zip (was: Re: Disk archival techniques)

[Brian Wheeler]

On Wed, 2005-05-18 at 13:44 -0700, Dwight K. Elvey wrote:
> >From: "Jim Leonard" <trixter at oldskool.org>
> ---snip---
> >  For years I've used RAR (WinRAR for windows, RAR and RAR32 for 
> ---snip---
> 
> Hi
>  It seems that may of you are missing the point. The archives
> are intended to be useable in say 500 years ( moved to
> future media ). Any proprietary application like WinRAR
> is useless for this purpose.

While I agree with the rar thing, I'm going to disagree below.

>  I use ZIP files all the time but I would not use any of
> this stuff for the purpose of archiving. I surely wouldn't
> even consider a window application for archiving.
>  Even things like error correction need to have their
> descriptions in the archive file. Do you expect to package
> a X86 simulator and WinRAR into a HTML like format with
> each of these compressed files? Back to reality folks!
> Dwight
> 
> 

Two things have to be taken into account, however:

* how practical is it to use the archive?

Putting it into a currently-standardish format is acceptable for the
medium term.  There is no format which will withstand eternity, so as
long as it can be used NOW and for the foreseeable future it can be
converted later.  Zip files (or tar) won't be around forever, but how
long has it been since you could buy half of the machines we've all got?
(heh, its been more than 10 years...)  So while the format may become
obsolete, its not going to disappear overnight. 

* how far does one have to go before you've gone to far?

That's a bit zen, but I think its an important question to ask. 


Brian