zip (was: Re: Disk archival techniques)

[Vintage Computer Festival]

On Thu, 19 May 2005, Jim Leonard wrote:

> On Thu, May 19, 2005 at 10:43:09AM -0700, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
> > See Dwight's last reply re: archivist standards.  Putting stuff in a ZIP
> > file is NOT archiving.
>
> For me, archiving has always been about preserving information.  It
> has had nothing to do with the transport mechanism of that
> information.  ZIP is a transport mechanism; an encoding of
> information, just like an ASCII file is an encoding of information.
>
> If I have an old hardware manual, and I scan it, OCR it
> (accurately!) to text, format the text in the same way it is typeset
> in the book (ie. to preserve tables, equations, etc.) and do so via
> HTML, and put it on the web -- did I not just archive the book?  If
> all of the information is available, what's the big deal?  What is
> lost in the translation?

You preserved the information.  Well done.  But by putting it inside a ZIP
archive and making THAT your distribution medium, you've made a fantastic
error.

> > > I see people on the thread complaining about having to bundle a
> > > windows emulator with each archive.  Excuse me?  Let's look at some
> > > popular formats:  TAR, ZIP, RAR all have source-code unarchivers.
> > > Which means they can run on any machine with a C compiler.  So
> > > what's with all the paranoia?  Just use whatever works as long as
> > > more than one major platform can extract it.
> >
> > For now.  What about 1 year from now?  5 years?  10 years?  50 years?  100
> > years?  500 years?
> >
> > Think LONGTERM.
>
> LONGTERM the information will have been translated to new
> media/medium by then.

There is no guarantee of this.  None whatsoever.  Unless you can predict
the future, in which case why are you wasting your time with me when you
should be out controlling the world? ;)

> If LONGTERM is truly a concern then why is the information being
> stored as ASCII data files at all?

Perhaps because ASCII is "the bottom"?  There's no where else to go.

> I can think of a lot more durable information transport mechanisms than
> hard disks or magnetic tape...

With denser data storage?

> > > (Not directed at Sellam, just commenting on all thread participants.)
> >
> > Ain't no thang ;)
>
> :-)

:)

-- 

Sellam Ismail                                        Vintage Computer Festival
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