Date   : Wed, 23 Aug 2006 10:55:22
From   : Andrew Benham <adsb@...>
Subject: Re: Hard disk backup - another challenge

Jonathan Graham Harston wrote:

> SerLink at http://mdfs.net/Software/Comms manages quite good
> speeds through direct access to the hardware.  It sends the data
> in one huge chunk, so a file full of repetative data takes the
> same time as a file full of random data. It would be worth
> updating it to send the data in packets with some form of
> compression, such as "this packet is all zeros".

Of course, unused (hard) disk space is seldom all zeros - it
depends one what the formatter wrote as default.  My DOS+
file is full of 0x6c bytes.
The principle is the same though - I suspect we need a way
to specify "12 sectors of just 0x6c bytes".

Or sparse files...


--
Andrew Benham         adsb@...       
Southgate, London N14, United Kingdom

The gates in my computer are AND OR and NOT, not "Bill"