zip (was: Re: Disk archival techniques)

On Thu, 2005-05-19 at 21:59 -0500, Scott Stevens wrote: I was meaning typical systems; obviously tar can be made to run on just about anything. But for the forseeable future at least, a machine is more likely to have zip tools *already* on it than tar (doesn't Windows even have - albeit crappy - zip functionality built in these days?). For the purpose of ensuring an archive's success, it seems sensible to use a format that's widespread and available without any additional fuss - *providing* other goals aren't compromised in the process. I've always used tar for archives myself (well, last ten years anyway) as I know they'd work across platforms. It's just that since someone pointed out that zip does have a "no compression" option I thought I'd ask list wisdom on its suitability. Seems that: a) There are questions over the open-ness of the spec b) Tar's still better at error recovery due to seperate headers per file ... which personally makes me think I'll carry on using tar. For the sizes of archives I tend to create, the 8GB limit won't be hit and so that's not a problem. cheers Jules