Disk archival techniques

[Vintage Computer Festival]

On Tue, 17 May 2005, Jules Richardson wrote:

> On Tue, 2005-05-17 at 15:07 -0500, Randy McLaughlin wrote:
> > I like and prefer media images as straight data dumps but I want the
> > formatting information of the original media somewhere.  I even want data
> > from media that is incomplete or has errors, also documented.
>
> Yep, me too. From when we were bashing around ideas about this though a
> few months back it seems that's a minority viewpoint; most people want
> data embedded in the metadata.
>
> For hard drive images I zero-pad any bad data but also include metadata
> in a seperate file - including disk geometry, which blocks are bad,
> resulting dump checksum, timestamp etc. along with anything else that
> might be particularly useful. For floppy images things would be
> significantly more complex though (due to factors as mentioned - variant
> sectors/track, different encoding for different tracks etc.)
>
> The idea behind futurekeep though was to make the metadata highly
> structured and in a similar vein to HTML in that clients could handle as
> much of the data as needed (eg. someone not dealing with variable bit
> rate images wouldn't need a decoder that could handle them). Ideally
> it'd be human-readable too (after a fashion) - e.g. XML - so that the
> data could be reconstructed into a disk image "by hand" even if some
> whizzy util to do it wasn't present. (understanding it at a file level
> is obviously outside the scope)
>
> That doesn't seem *too* much to ask; basic metadata can be created for
> existing images without a lot of hassle *if desired*. To me such a
> format's more useful for future image creation though, particularly in
> the case of less-common systems; the popular machines are likely to be
> covered by their own archive formats already and the following large
> enough that lack of data is not (yet) a problem. Rather than messing
> around with proprietary image formats for those, or formats that aren't
> particularly descriptive, it'd be nice to start from day 1 using
> something that allows us to capture all the useful stuff that goes along
> with the raw data.

Sorry to quote the entire message, but mostly what Jules said is my
response.

I just don't want to engage in a discussion and explain/defend the
FutureKeep concept until we've progressed a bit farther with it.  I've
been so tied up with finishing other outstanding projects over the past
several months that FutureKeep has effectively stalled, though I'm gearing
up on it again.

I think once people see the draft proposal of FutureKeep all fleshed out,
which takes into account the ephemeral nature of digital media in general,
and which incorporates philosophies which will hopefully ensure that image
archives stay around for a long time, they will see the value of it and
not only support but actively use it.

We have some very smart people working on it.  Once we get rolling again
we'll want more involved.  I suspect things will start to heat up again in
a couple more weeks, and I will post an announcement here (and of course
on the FK mailing list) once things start to roll.

-- 

Sellam Ismail                                        Vintage Computer Festival
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International Man of Intrigue and Danger                http://www.vintage.org

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