dmg for archiving

[Peter Marreck]

On Jan 25, 2004, at 8:48 AM, Mac OS X Unix wrote:

> This is a valid concern for long term backup. If you're concerned about
> long-term (10 year plus), go with tar files on a stock iso 9660 CD - as
> long as there's a unix and/or its relatives, there will be tar, and the
> ability to mount iso format CDs.
>

I too am a bit of a digital packrat.

For archiving, I am currently using internally-compressed dmg files and 
burning them to ISO 9660 CD's. For images that are larger than 700MB, I 
have a dropscript I wrote which will segment them (email me if you want 
it). I fully expect these to be openable in 10 years, just like images 
made with Apple's oldest floppy disk image format from 1990 are still 
openable now (theoretically). (I've been using Macs since '84.)

The advantage of using dmg over tar is the still-present resource-fork 
issue with Macs. Not to mention, you can double-click-mount the image, 
even a segmented one (as long as all segments are present in the same 
directory)... You can't do that with tar. The final advantage is the 
internal compression (although, yes, gzip is doable for that angle...)

On a related note, I'm currently evaluating methods of archiving 
paperwork to disk. Ideally I'd like an automated workflow where I slap 
a document on my Epson 1200U, hit "scan", and save it as an OCR'd PDF 
with the image in front of the text (so it looks identical to the 
document yet is searchable, save minor OCR errors). I can do this 
manually with OmniPagePro X, but it's sooooo slooooowwww.... Anyone 
have ideas on that? (sorry if offtopic...)

-Peter Marreck
-------------------
Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want.