8" floppy project

On Wed, 2004-08-04 at 14:43, John Foust wrote: Odd, but I was thinking exactly the same thing earlier. My other random thought was that storage is cheap these days - is it desirable to include the file format spec itself as part of the file format? :-) If you're going to be storing a few hundred KB of data (or tens of KB at least) on modern hardware, then a few KB of ASCII within the file explaining the structure is no hardship. Then in x years time when someone's long since lost any supporting documentation, at least all they need to do is view the data in a text editor and it'll tell them the structure. Personally I wouldn't mind a few % of overhead on each file. Taking it a step further, if there's room to define the data format (filesystem) on the original disc too, then all the better! yep, and of course what system it's for, the date the archive was created, name / (possibly) contact info for the person who the floppy came from, version of the archive program used to create the archive etc. In the days when disk storage is aimed at people saving huge audio and video files, 'wasteful' metadata for an archived floppy image doesn't seem to much of a problem to me, not when it might prove useful to someone in the years to come (possibly long after the hardware itself's disappeared off the map) Preferably I'd like something to cope not just with floppy images, but hard disk images too, ROM images, and possibly even scans of paper documentation. Some sort of tagged system springs to mind; the fact that binary and ACSII data is being mixed suggests that maybe all the binary data should come toward the end of the file as a continuous block, with some sort of table as part of the file metadata information defining file offsets / lengths for different chunks of binary data (whether they be disk sectors or whatever). No, that's not very editable, but then this is an archive format and not designed to be changed once created anyway. cheers Jules