zip (was: Re: Disk archival techniques)

There's plenty of file system meta-data out there to confound this process. Blindly archiving and un-archiving will destroy data that's not inside the file. There's a lot to be said for archiving images of entire filesystems. What, timestamps aren't important? Creation dates as well as last-modified dates? Archive bits? At least 'tar' preserves Unix's groups and permissions to a reasonable degree. The Mac has always had data and resource forks and all the cross-platform confusion that goes with them. Microsoft added hooks to NTFS to let files have split forks like this; lately they've been used by spyware and viruses to hide payloads. I recall file comment fields in Amiga filenames: rarely used for practical applications, but there none the less. Even AmigaDOS's own operations were cruel to them; I seem to remember that its early "copy" commands didn't copy these notes but "diskcopy" obviously would. Similarly, even today, Windows doesn't preserve the timestamp on directories when 'xcopy'-ing from place to place. What, timestamps aren't valuable info? - John