Software Archival

[aftermac]

I am in the process of going through all of my computers, floppies, and CD's and archiving all of the software to a hard drive. I have an 80 GB Firewire HD connected to my beige G3, which has an internal Zip drive. I am using my external SCSI Zip drive to archive the HD's of my old computers and then transfer them to the Firewire drive via my beige G3.

There are many compression/archival programs and formats for Macintosh (.sea, .sit, .cpt, .img, .bin, .dmg, etc...). I have used all of these formats over the years. However, I would like to use one program and one format as a standard for this project, unless there is a strong reason to use multiple.

I am looking for the best format to use regardless of the OS or hardware. Any suggestions? I am also looking for opinions on imaging floppies and CD's vs. copying them to my hard drive and compressing them.

Thanks!

 

[Unknown_K]

I use the common formats associated with the platform so that a user who grabs a part of your archie and transfer it to the machine it was intended for and use it.

Here is what I do:

I use Toast to make CD images of Mac CDs, they can be burned on a PC if you change the toast extension to *.iso. You can also just use any PC app that does an ISO format since you can burn the CDs on any platform and still use them on any Mac.

All floppies are imaged using diskcopy 6.3.3 from Apple, the images are then compressed into one file using 68k compatible stuffit (*.sit). Compressed files can be moved around to different platforms and HDs without getting them trashed (losing the resource fork). I recommend using a 68K with a superdrive if you want to read 720k and earlier floppies.

 

[chris]

Good standards to use are .img for floppies, zips and HDs, and .iso for CDs. These are both multiplatform standards and can be used on almost all computers with appropriate software.

.img is pretty inefficient because it's a direct copy of the data, all of the data, on the device, even empty space. However, they compress well and like I said can be used on almost any platform.

 

[aftermac]

Thanks for the input, this helps a lot!

 

[Unknown_K]

Since we are on the subject I want to put an archive together for original driver disks, so if anybody comes across any let me know and I will give you my email to send me the images.

Hopefully I will have a server to host them soon enough (or just use my LC3 to do it at home over a cable modem).

 

[kreats]

what software do you use to make an img file from a hard drive (on a 68k mac)?

 

[aftermac]

what software do you use to make an img file from a hard drive (on a 68k mac)?

Disk Copy 6.3.3.

Disk Copy 6.3.3 is a fat binary so it will work on PPC and 68k. It requires System 7.0.1. Keep in mind that you may need a second hard disk to save the HD image to. Disk Copy 4.2 works with system 6.

 

[joshc]

In case anyone is wondering where to get Disk Copy 6.3.3:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=60353

 

[Charlieman]

Disk Copy 6.3.3 is a fat binary so it will work on PPC and 68k. It requires System 7.0.1. Keep in mind that you may need a second hard disk to save the HD image to. Disk Copy 4.2 works with system 6.

Thus Disk Copy 6.3.3 is not appropriate for pre-System 7 disks. It will image 800KB HFS disks, but you can't convert the image into a real floppy on a Plus running System 6. For disks intended for use with System 6 and earlier, Disk Copy 4.2 or DART are better options.

For compressing files, I suggest Stuffit 1.5 for the System 6 and earlier era software. Stuffit 1.5 is a bit clunky to use, so for System 7 onwards, I always use a compression program that is compatible with Stuffit Expander 3.5. Stuffit Expander 3.5 is easy to find -- Apple shipped it on system install CDs -- and it is the lowest common denominator standard for System 7. Later versions of the Stuffit compression utilities "enhanced" the product, requiring a later version of the Expander. Some of the later versions of Expander do not work on 68K Macs, hence my preference for version 3.5 compatibility.