mount complains about exFAT when mounting partclone image of NTFS partition

I've made a backup of an NTFS partition with partclone, like this: partclone.ntfs -cs /dev/sdk1 -o ./ntfs_backup.img In case that's relevant: The physical hard drive was sitting in a USB dock. Now, I'd like to compare the contents of that image with the contents of the partition, which have changed in the meantime. To do that, I've put the hard drive in the USB dock again, and it shows up alright as having 4 NTFS partition, and nothing else. Then, I am trying to mount the image with the original state of that partition, but that fails: # mount ./ntfs_backup.img /mnt/ntfs_backup FUSE exfat 1.3.0 ERROR: exFAT file system is not found. Why on earth is exFAT being mentioned here? I read through this question here and tried using the `-o loop` option, but that changes nothing. I also tried specifying the file system type explicitly: # mount -t ntfs ./ntfs_backup.img /mnt/ntfs_backup NTFS signature is missing. Failed to mount '/dev/loop10': Das Argument ist ungültig The device '/dev/loop10' doesn't seem to have a valid NTFS. Maybe the wrong device is used? Or the whole disk instead of a partition (e.g. /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1)? Or the other way around? Looking closer, however, it seems that partclone images are not directly mountable, even though I did not compress this one (because I wanted to be able to mount it directly). According to a few other resources, I should be using `partclone.restore` to convert the cloned image file to a ... regular image file? However: # cat ./ntfs_backup.img | partclone.restore -C -s - -O ./ntfs_backup.img Partclone v0.3.13 http://partclone.org Starting to restore image (-) to device (./ntfs_backup_mountable.img) device (./ntfs_backup_mountable.img) is mounted at error exit Partclone fail, please check /var/log/partclone.log ! I suppose I can skip the piping here because the image is not compressed, but running `partclone.restore -C -s ./ntfs_backup.img -o ntfs_backup.img` gives me the same error. ...what am I doing wrong? For this time, I do need to mount the image (which I also have as a n fsarchive file, in case that helps at all), but for the future, I wouldn't mind knowing how to create a mountable image of a partition directly. **Update** Following some advice from @kanehekili used `ntfs-3g` to specify the file system type: # mount -t ntfs-3g ./ntfs_backup.img /mnt/ntfs_backup NTFS signature is missing. Failed to mount './ntfs_backup.img': Das Argument ist ungültig The device '/ntfs_backup.img' doesn't seem to have a valid NTFS. Maybe the wrong device is used? Or the whole disk instead of a partition (e.g. /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1)? Or the other way around? So, interestingly, this no longer tries to refer to `/dev/loop10`. I don't know what to make of it, though. I think I must be misunderstanding something, or the way I created the images is not compatible with the mounting process. I *was* able to clone the image back onto another hard drive without problems, though, using `partclone.ntfs`. This means the immediate problem is solved, but I'd still like to be able to create an image of a partition (using partclone -- or fsarchiver) which can be mounted, at least read-only.