[X-Unix] dmg for archiving

[James Bucanek]

Kirk McElhearn wrote on Sunday, January 25, 2004:

>On 1/25/04 19:21, "Peter Marreck" <prm1 at cornell.edu> wrote:
>
>> 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...)
>
>The disadvantage - and I've seen this, when I used to use DMGs for archives
>- is that if one byte gets screwed up you won't be able to mount the DMG.
>
>I think you should definitely avoid any type of compression for any
>long-term archiving.

Or, consider creating some parity files.  I have a number of massive (compressed) archives that are split across a half dozen CDs.  I create one or two additional parity CDs using par or par2.  Then, if any portion of one or two of those CDs are unreadable in the future, I can still recover the data.

______________________________________________________
James Bucanek       <mailto:privatereply at gloaming.com>