Shoppa, Tim wrote:
OTOH I keep all
of my images compressed, precisely because I want to know if any copy has been corrupted.
Specifically I prefer bzip2 (even though a lot of my imaging
activities from the 1990's, before I knew about bzip2, are squirreled
away in zip files and I have not necessarily moved them to bzip2).
If for some reason the only copy of a bz2 file
became partially corrupted I could know which parts were good and which parts were bad:
RECOVERING DATA FROM DAMAGED FILES
bzip2 compresses files in blocks, usually 900kbytes long.
Each block is handled independently. If a media or transmission error
causes a multi-block .bz2 file to become damaged, it may be possible to
recover data from the undamaged blocks in the file.
The compressed representation of each block is delimited by a 48-bit
pattern, which makes it possible to find the block boundaries
with reasonable certainty. Each block also carries its own 32-bit CRC, so
damaged blocks can be distinguished from undamaged ones.
bzip2recover is a simple program whose purpose is to search for blocks
in .bz2 files, and write each block out into its own .bz2
file. You can then use bzip2 -t to test the integrity of the
resulting files, and decompress those which are undamaged.
I also use bzip2 to compress and md5 to verify the files I want to archive.
I found free ware versions about 10 years ago.
Is it possible to find the md5 algorithm? I would like to run the code
under
the E11 emulator to check files copied from the PC to determine if they are
still OK? I have found a number of web sites which discuss md5, but none
that have the actual algorithm.
However, the versions of the program that I use handle only one file at
a time.
Are there more recent versions which allow multiple files to be processed at
one time?
In addition, When I archive files, I usually set up an ASCII file for
each group
of archived files which lists the File Name, File Size and MD5 value. This
ASCII file is stored with the archived files so that it is possible to
check for
file integrity and prevent bit rot. Are there any programs which cal be
used
to produce files with the above information?
Finally, if s complete device is being archived, I suggest GHOST be
considered.
GHOST can also product an ASCII file which can also produced compressed
file images in addition to an ASCII file which contains a list of the
files in the
image of the device which is being archived, although this option is
available
only if the file structure of the device is FAT32. Another restriction
is that
GHOST is an off-line application, i.e. GHOST can run only when the DOS
operating system has been booted.
Otherwise, GHOST is quite fast. A 2 GB collection of files can be
compressed
down to about 1 GB. On a Pentium III, it takes about 7 minutes. On a
3.0 GHZ
core 2 duo, about 16 GB compresses to about 10 GB and takes about 30 minutes
to produce the 5 files to hold all of the date.
Jeorme Fine