On Thu, 12 Aug 2004, Antonio Carlini wrote:
> My reason for mandating a CRC would be that otherwise
> you have no way of knowing that an error has occurred.
> An unreliable archive format is a terrible thing to
> foist on future generations: they should be able to
> know whether the data has been correctly preserved
> or not. Without a CRC (or similar mechanism) you have
> no guarantee of that. One of the advantages of storing
> zip (or rar or whatever) archives on CD is that if
> you can copy it off and unzip it, you can reasonably
> expect the end result to be an accurate reproduction of
> the original.
The problem with ZIP for example is that if the archive is considerably
corrupted you don't get anything. I'd rather have an archive with some
corrupt data than a ZIP file that won't unzip :(
But anyway, again, point taken (again).
> Error correction is just an added bonus and may or may
> not be worth the additional effort. Perhaps optional
> additional redundancy (OpenVMS BACKUP will write a
> parity block of data for every N blocks of real
> data, PAR implements "RAID for newsgroups").
It should be possible to add error correcting data to the archive.
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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Received on Thu Aug 12 2004 - 20:48:25 BST