Let's develop an open-source media archive standard

From: Teo Zenios <teoz_at_neo.rr.com>
Date: Thu Aug 12 21:54:12 2004

----- Original Message -----
From: "Vintage Computer Festival" <vcf_at_siconic.com>
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 12, 2004 9:48 PM
Subject: RE: Let's develop an open-source media archive standard


> 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

SmartPAR works very well for completing missing files (very popular in
newsgroups).
You are much better off using a system that is already used by others then
making one up as you go since the odds are a common recovery method would
survive longer.
Received on Thu Aug 12 2004 - 21:54:12 BST