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In message Sun, 4 Dec 94 23:57:10 -0500, dewar@gnat.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes: > "Make sure you backup reguarly when using any sort of compression program" > > why? because you think the program may have disastrous bugs? I personally > won't use compression programs until they do NOT come with caveats of > this kind! Because compressed data is much less recoverable than uncompressed data. Say you have an important financial spreadsheet. Say, through no fault of the compression program, one of the sectors on your hard disk goes bad. Say part of that spreadsheet is on that sector. It is possible with a program like PCTools or Norton to recover all of that file except the section on the bad sector. Not bad if the file is ~100k like most spreadsheets seem to be. Say the file was compressed. You could recover all the data up to the bad sector, but afterwards the decompression program wouldn't know what to do because of the missing sector. You can only recover half the file on average. If the file was ~100k, would you want to reconstruct the missing 50k? This problem can be worse if the compression program saves everything in one big compressed file. You should be backing up your data anyway. _____________________________________________________________________ |\_____________________________________________________________________\ | | | | | John H. Kim "None of what you are seeing is actually happening." | | | jokim@mit.edu | | | jokim@uni.uiuc.edu - disclaimer for TV movie 'Without Warning' | \|_____________________________________________________________________|