Archiving woes: ZIP, DMG, SITX, RAR explored...
I'm a pretty comfortable osx user and I'm setting up to start archiving loads of data of my system for secure longterm storage and retrival. Being a designer and old some oldschool font sets I'd like to ensure integrity of all my files resource forks (if present etc.)
I'm at the point where I could use some feedback as I look at the options I have for archiving/compressing as I have many concerns over my options:
(please understand my environment at the moment is osx, 10.4.9)
ZIP
I am thoroughly impressed that in osx you can now zip files via contextual menus "Create archive of..." I'm even more so impressed that I can even preserve resource forks of legacy font files. I'd love to move to nuking a nuking of all my resource forks but thats just not going to happen yet. So, *.zip files are pretty awesome but another great thing would be a way to control the compression factor of this "Create Achive of..." option. Is there a way to do it? Another major CON of *.zip files that I've noticed on occasion. I've had folders of multiple zip archives... say 24 archives all less that a megabyte a piece... Shouldn't I be able to expand them all without erroring out? Has anyone else noticed this? I've seen similar behavior on multiple systems. Some groups of files it goes through smoothly. Others it chokes up and errors out all over the place. Not sure what causes the culprit...
STUFFIT
This company has had its ups and downs, I remember not even bothering with one version of it because I found its stuffing and unstuffing of its archive format so unreliable that its scared/pis$$ed the cr^p out of me. I must say though that despite the fact that my G5's fan rev up to wind-tunnel speeds it does do an AWESOME job of compressing files in its "sitx" format. OSX used to have it built in and the native format for compressing and decompressing file but now they have clearly moved to zip. (zip is smart move in the sense that its common and won't throw PC users off and be like wtf man?) Here's the problem I have repeatedly noticed with stuffit, previous and latest version, and YES I am going to compare it to how some PC user friends of mine have done their archiving. Here's the scenario of a PC user and RARing files... user has 12 folders on their drive ranging in folder size from 3-7gigs each. I've seen it that users sets each folder to begin RARing one after another and let them all chug away over night to have 12 compressed and segmented sets of files the next morning, the progress bars as these are chugging away compressing and segmenting are present as well giving decent visual feedback. I try this with stuffint... rightclick>stuff>sitx, then choose my next folder and it begins processing... looking at the previous,...looks like it locks up, no decent visual feedback... Shouldn't I be able to multitask.. set 12 to go and walk away and not have to babysit it. Perhaps I'm being impatient and shouldn't compare... I'd love to hear others experiences.
DMG
Diskimaging is awesome, I love it, its a nice container that doesn't force me to extra all the content of say an entire video project if all I needed was a still file in the project folder, just mount the image... do a little digging.. grab the content I need, unmount and well yeah, you know how they work. Try this though if you want to get dismayed, mount say 4-6 disk images with each a couple hundred images in them each from say a portable harddrive... select all the mounted images and copy them over to your local work drive or whever via finder. It will count for a while and then sometimes... just disappear... no alert that it didn't complete... bah... wtf again! Interestingly though I pull of the copy via commandline using "ditto." I can mount up the images open up a couple terminal windows and issue each a ditto to the local drive, set the all to go and walk away and come back knowing everything copies over perfectly. Another awesome program for DMGing is DropDMG, nice gui with lots of options... however... I dare you to try the RAR deal story and do a couple at a time... seems like they proceed but then errors. *sigh* (At least I'm told about the errors though unlike the finder copy...)
RAR
This is one I'd love to see developed/pushed maybe even researched more by myself. RARs seems awesome, I don't know if they support resourceforks? But the fact that one can compress, segment, create parity... awesome. I am aware of Split and Concat, MacParDeluxe, but you see thats adding to the number of programs one would have to use to get the job done. (I'm just saying it be great to just deal with one app eh?) RAR doesn't seem like its really out there for a mac yet, though I am tracking this one program called "SimplyRAR" site seems to be under construction: http://www.reflectionsvm.co.uk/
It would be nice if it supported resource forks as well, I'd love to see it solidly ported to osx as it appears to be a nice solid format for pc as well.
So, I'd love to hear everyone else's thoughts on the above matters, if I've overlooked anything, not been patient enough. I'm not scared to drop to command line but it would be nice to stick to the gui right? I'm sorry this has been such a long post but I wanted to explain everything as throroughly explored as I could. I will attempt to cross post this on ars if I don't hear back enough, or for a diversified feedback.
Once again the ultime goals here are; Archive, Compress, Preserve resource forks, Split/Segment Options, Parity, Cross Platform, and ability to run MULTIPLE compress/decompressions Simultaneously.
I'm at the point where I could use some feedback as I look at the options I have for archiving/compressing as I have many concerns over my options:
(please understand my environment at the moment is osx, 10.4.9)
ZIP
I am thoroughly impressed that in osx you can now zip files via contextual menus "Create archive of..." I'm even more so impressed that I can even preserve resource forks of legacy font files. I'd love to move to nuking a nuking of all my resource forks but thats just not going to happen yet. So, *.zip files are pretty awesome but another great thing would be a way to control the compression factor of this "Create Achive of..." option. Is there a way to do it? Another major CON of *.zip files that I've noticed on occasion. I've had folders of multiple zip archives... say 24 archives all less that a megabyte a piece... Shouldn't I be able to expand them all without erroring out? Has anyone else noticed this? I've seen similar behavior on multiple systems. Some groups of files it goes through smoothly. Others it chokes up and errors out all over the place. Not sure what causes the culprit...
STUFFIT
This company has had its ups and downs, I remember not even bothering with one version of it because I found its stuffing and unstuffing of its archive format so unreliable that its scared/pis$$ed the cr^p out of me. I must say though that despite the fact that my G5's fan rev up to wind-tunnel speeds it does do an AWESOME job of compressing files in its "sitx" format. OSX used to have it built in and the native format for compressing and decompressing file but now they have clearly moved to zip. (zip is smart move in the sense that its common and won't throw PC users off and be like wtf man?) Here's the problem I have repeatedly noticed with stuffit, previous and latest version, and YES I am going to compare it to how some PC user friends of mine have done their archiving. Here's the scenario of a PC user and RARing files... user has 12 folders on their drive ranging in folder size from 3-7gigs each. I've seen it that users sets each folder to begin RARing one after another and let them all chug away over night to have 12 compressed and segmented sets of files the next morning, the progress bars as these are chugging away compressing and segmenting are present as well giving decent visual feedback. I try this with stuffint... rightclick>stuff>sitx, then choose my next folder and it begins processing... looking at the previous,...looks like it locks up, no decent visual feedback... Shouldn't I be able to multitask.. set 12 to go and walk away and not have to babysit it. Perhaps I'm being impatient and shouldn't compare... I'd love to hear others experiences.
DMG
Diskimaging is awesome, I love it, its a nice container that doesn't force me to extra all the content of say an entire video project if all I needed was a still file in the project folder, just mount the image... do a little digging.. grab the content I need, unmount and well yeah, you know how they work. Try this though if you want to get dismayed, mount say 4-6 disk images with each a couple hundred images in them each from say a portable harddrive... select all the mounted images and copy them over to your local work drive or whever via finder. It will count for a while and then sometimes... just disappear... no alert that it didn't complete... bah... wtf again! Interestingly though I pull of the copy via commandline using "ditto." I can mount up the images open up a couple terminal windows and issue each a ditto to the local drive, set the all to go and walk away and come back knowing everything copies over perfectly. Another awesome program for DMGing is DropDMG, nice gui with lots of options... however... I dare you to try the RAR deal story and do a couple at a time... seems like they proceed but then errors. *sigh* (At least I'm told about the errors though unlike the finder copy...)
RAR
This is one I'd love to see developed/pushed maybe even researched more by myself. RARs seems awesome, I don't know if they support resourceforks? But the fact that one can compress, segment, create parity... awesome. I am aware of Split and Concat, MacParDeluxe, but you see thats adding to the number of programs one would have to use to get the job done. (I'm just saying it be great to just deal with one app eh?) RAR doesn't seem like its really out there for a mac yet, though I am tracking this one program called "SimplyRAR" site seems to be under construction: http://www.reflectionsvm.co.uk/
It would be nice if it supported resource forks as well, I'd love to see it solidly ported to osx as it appears to be a nice solid format for pc as well.
So, I'd love to hear everyone else's thoughts on the above matters, if I've overlooked anything, not been patient enough. I'm not scared to drop to command line but it would be nice to stick to the gui right? I'm sorry this has been such a long post but I wanted to explain everything as throroughly explored as I could. I will attempt to cross post this on ars if I don't hear back enough, or for a diversified feedback.
Once again the ultime goals here are; Archive, Compress, Preserve resource forks, Split/Segment Options, Parity, Cross Platform, and ability to run MULTIPLE compress/decompressions Simultaneously.
Comments
So, *.zip files are pretty awesome but another great thing would be a way to control the compression factor of this "Create Achive of..." option. Is there a way to do it?
I don't think there is with create archive but if there are compression levels with zip, you would be able to write a shell script and execute that from the contextual menu using the On My Command plugin.
Another major CON of *.zip files that I've noticed on occasion. I've had folders of multiple zip archives... say 24 archives all less that a megabyte a piece... Shouldn't I be able to expand them all without erroring out? Has anyone else noticed this? I've seen similar behavior on multiple systems. Some groups of files it goes through smoothly. Others it chokes up and errors out all over the place. Not sure what causes the culprit...
BOMArchiver has problems extracting multiple archives I've noticed. You have to be careful with this because it leaves invisible temp files everywhere too. So if you decompress say 200MB archives, every crash can leave a 200MB temp file on your disk. I think they begin with .bom. If you use easyfind, you should be able to get them as Spotlight won't. You can use the terminal too.
STUFFIT
Avoid it as much as you can. It's proprietary and not reliable.
DMG
Try this though if you want to get dismayed, mount say 4-6 disk images with each a couple hundred images in them each from say a portable harddrive... select all the mounted images and copy them over to your local work drive or whever via finder. It will count for a while and then sometimes... just disappear... no alert that it didn't complete... bah... wtf again! Interestingly though I pull of the copy via commandline using "ditto." I can mount up the images open up a couple terminal windows and issue each a ditto to the local drive, set the all to go and walk away and come back knowing everything copies over perfectly. Another awesome program for DMGing is DropDMG, nice gui with lots of options... however... I dare you to try the RAR deal story and do a couple at a time... seems like they proceed but then errors. *sigh* (At least I'm told about the errors though unlike the finder copy...)
I use DMGs. The Finder is a nuisance though because it keeps forgetting permissions. Besides that, I haven't had any problems copying large amounts of files between multiple images. I only ever use about 3 at a time though. The command line is definitely more reliable than the Finder. That's why it needs a fixin'.
RAR
This is one I'd love to see developed/pushed maybe even researched more by myself. RARs seems awesome, I don't know if they support resourceforks? But the fact that one can compress, segment, create parity... awesome. I am aware of Split and Concat, MacParDeluxe, but you see thats adding to the number of programs one would have to use to get the job done. (I'm just saying it be great to just deal with one app eh?) RAR doesn't seem like its really out there for a mac yet
The official Rar command line tool works pretty well for OS X. It's good at recovering from corruption. I wouldn't say it's as usable as DMG though, which is my preferred format.
Archive, Compress, Preserve resource forks, Split/Segment Options, Parity, Cross Platform, and ability to run MULTIPLE compress/decompressions Simultaneously.
I'd say given that list, Zip looks like the best option but just don't use the BOMarchiver tool in OS X for it. Use the command-line zip tool.