.dmg .smi are two Apple disk image formats that are rather new. How long will they be supported? Is it reasonable to use them for such things as archiving on a CD-ROM? Some of the older floppy image files that I once made can be unpacked only if I crank up my Mac IIFX for the job. Remember DropDisk? For the last few years I have limited myself to ASCII text and things like tab separated columns instead of .xls for data. Now with UTF-8, 16, and 32 I'm worried about that. Format-creep seems to be a modern buzzword. Is something like .dmg, with a promise from Apple, the answer? Don't we owe paleontologists of CY 3000 the equivalent of stone tablets? -- --> There are 10 kinds of people: those who understand binary, and those who don't <--