zip (was: Re: Disk archival techniques)

[Roger Merchberger]

Rumor has it that Jules Richardson may have mentioned these words:

>If it *is* portable, it might seem a better choice for archives over
>tar, simply because more systems these days can handle zip files than
>can handle tar files...

As DJB would say, "Profile, don't speculate."

Almost all .zip utilities written in the last 4-5 years support tar (and 
gzip tar) files flawlessly.

I'm speculating to the fact that you're talking Win32 boxen, as you said 
"more systems these days" and Wintel boxen are "most boxen" these days. 
Surely MacOSX can handle tar files, eh? ;-)

That and the fact that tar's been around nearly forever and is open-source, 
that I would think one would have a better chance of getting a tar utility 
on a system without tar, than getting a zip utility on a system that had no 
zip.

Veering offtopically towards FutureKeep territory, I still think that the 
spec should be non-compressed, and at least somewhat human-readable. (Or at 
least human-typeable if one needed to type in a small disk image 
manually[1]). If you wanna make it smaller, you can compress it yourself 
with any utility you choose.

Disk storage is cheap nowadays...

Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger

[1] Why would one want to type a disk image in by hand? For some machines, 
a blank, basic boot image would be small enough to type in, so one could 
print out the FutureKeep file and keep it in a drawer, just in case every 
piece of digital media it was kept on went bad. If every piece == 1, it's 
not exactly a remote possibility...

--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger  --  SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers
  _±±_                          zmerch at 30below.com
(©||®)  If at first you don't succeed, nuclear warhead
  _)(_   disarmament should *not* be your first career choice.