zip (was: Re: Disk archival techniques)

[John Foust]

There's plenty of file system meta-data out there to confound
this process.  Blindly archiving and un-archiving will destroy
data that's not inside the file.  There's a lot to be said for 
archiving images of entire filesystems.  What, timestamps
aren't important?  Creation dates as well as last-modified dates?
Archive bits?  At least 'tar' preserves Unix's groups and 
permissions to a reasonable degree.  

The Mac has always had data and resource forks and all the
cross-platform confusion that goes with them.  Microsoft added
hooks to NTFS to let files have split forks like this; lately
they've been used by spyware and viruses to hide payloads.

I recall file comment fields in Amiga filenames: rarely used for
practical applications, but there none the less.  Even AmigaDOS's
own operations were cruel to them; I seem to remember that
its early "copy" commands didn't copy these notes but "diskcopy"
obviously would.  Similarly, even today, Windows doesn't preserve
the timestamp on directories when 'xcopy'-ing from place to place.
What, timestamps aren't valuable info?

- John