Uncompress a compactos installation offline

Is there any way to compress/uncompress a system installation from outside of the installation, like from a winpe?
From the help of compact.exe I can see that I can at least query the status of compactos of an Offline OS. But I can neither compress or decompress it from outside. I think the base uncompress flag might work if I just give a directory to it. But do I need to use other flags alongside?

If I'm understanding correctly, you want to backup a system from the winpe environment and then be able to open that backup and access files. Is that right? If so you can install Macrium Reflect Free, make Macrium bootable recovery media from within the application, then boot from the recovery media and backup in WinPE.
The image you create can then be mounted on any system that has Macrium installed and all files become accessible.

RaexD said:

Is there any way to compress/uncompress a system installation from outside of the installation, like from a winpe?
From the help of compact.exe I can see that I can at least query the status of compactos of an Offline OS. But I can neither compress or decompress it from outside. I think the base uncompress flag might work if I just give a directory to it. But do I need to use other flags alongside?

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This might help. You would need to create a custom install.wim, use compactos, then reinstall I think.

Sounds a lot of hassle though - why not just do it online?-