The task: take a directory tree with 100's of Mb up to several Gb of stuff, with many files, and a fair amount number of symlinks. Produce a file that is an image of a mountable file system for use as an AWS volume snapshot. If at all possible, don't require root access.My first attempt is to use the genext2fs utility. However, for one of my file systems, this fails an internal consistency check of the program. For another, the arithmetic I found to precalculate the number of inodes and blocks went wrong, and it ran out of space.There are recipes involving loopback mounts out there, is that the best I'm going to do? 
How to build large file system images, preferable without root access
disk image