Disk archival techniques

As coincidence would have it, I work at Indiana University's Digital Library Program and there was a lecture on archiving audio which hits many of the same issues that have come up here. The conclusions that they came up with for the project included: * There's no such thing as an eternal media: the data must be transportable to the latest generation of storage * Metadata should be bundled with the content * Act like you get one chance to read the media :( While this is a different context, the principle is basically the same. I've got a pile of TK50 tapes I'm backing up using the SIMH tape format, so this is relevant to that process as well. I think the optimum format for doing this isn't a single file, but a collection of files bundled into a single package. Someone mentioned tar, I think, and zip would work just as well. The container could contain these components: * content metadata - info from the disk's label/sleeve, etc * media metadata - the type of media this came from * archivist metadata - who did it, methods used, notes, etc * badblock information - 0 blocks which are actually bad. * content - a bytestream of the data I don't think there's any real need to document the physical properties of the media for EVERY disk archived -- there should probably be a repository of 'standard' media types (1541's different-sectors-per-track info, FM vs MFM per track information, etc) plus overrides in the media metadata (uses fat-tracks, is 40 track vs 35, etc). Emulators could use the content part of the file as-is and collectors would have enough information to recreate the original media. It would also allow for cataloging fairly easily. Brian