Mounting a stream encoder as a drive in windows?

For a variety of reasons, revolving around cost of copy and the travails of the Windows filesystem, I need to mount a stream encoder as a drive, so that incoming data can simply be blindly directed at this "drive", aggregated, and encoded, without the source program being any the wiser. This would be basically trivial on Linux, but seems to be an uphill struggle on windows.

Specifically, I'd like to be able to "mount" a tar开发者_运维知识库 builder, which I know sounds odd, but there's a compelling reason for doing this. Is there a utility or library that deals with this? Perhaps an obscure part of the Windows API?

This looks promising... but it seems intended to mount folders or similar, rather than "devices." I do have control of where the data is written, so I can specify an arbitrary path.

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Having experience with virtual drives (see our Virtual Storage product line) I can say that your task needs some redefining. As said in comments, drives (or, better say, filesystems) in Windows are expected to be namely filesystems (unlike Unix world), and as such they must support certain reading and enumeration operations, which is not something you'd expect.

Probably the closest you can do is a virtual drive in memory whose contents are then passed to your application in some way. The user will drag the data to your drive and on unmounting (or on other command) drive contents are passed to other program.

Several of our products can be used for your task (see CallbackDisk, Callback File System and SolFS OS Edition on Virtual Storage page), yet they are all commercial products. If you have a one-time or short-term task, you can build something for your use with a trial key.

There exist free approaches to your task, namely Pismo File Mount and Dokan, but I don't know how well they fit.