Do you need to have sufficient space on a hard drive to mount a disk image (backup)?

Question

So I just backed up two drives onto a single backup drive. I used AOMEI's Backupper. I backed up a 1tb drive (basically fully filled) no problem, and could mount the image and explore it's files. I then backed up a 6tb drive (about 3tbs of data) which was successful as well. I then mounted it, but this time I can't explore the image. Windows (10) says I don't have access and that the drive is media protected.

I contacted AOMEI, but they didn't seem to offer me much explanation or a solution other than saying it's a bug.

So I thought I should use a different program, but then I thought maybe that wouldn't solve the problem. I started to wonder about where those files from a mounted image are kept.

Let's say I have a 1tb of data backed up into a 500gb image on a drive that's only 600gb big, would that allow me to mount the image and explore it, or would you need to have it on a drive with enough free space to allow for 1tb worth of data on it?

Basically does there have to be enough physical hard drive space to allow you to browse the actual amount of data stored in an image?

I couldn't find anything to confirm if this is the case, so I thought I'd ask here. Any insight is appreciated.

Answer 1

Using Macrium Reflect free, I've had no trouble browsing images of ~2 TB, though the PC's HDD has only a few hundred GB free and there are numerous other large images on the backup drive.

However, "media is protected" doesn't imply you're out of room. In Reflect, there are option to gain access to restricted folders and to make it appear the mounted image is writable; perhaps a similar setting must be used in AOMEI Backupper.