Re: making a boot disk on iigs

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Jeff Blakeney wrote:

<snip>

>Initializing is much faster, especially on large volumes like hard
>drives but it does leave a lot of non-zero blocks around and if you do
>a volume backup, all those non-zero blocks will take up extra space
>that could be compressed to practically nothing if they were zero
>blocks. 

This is not true of all volume copy programs.

ProSel's Volume Copy utility, for example, only writes the blocks
which are marked in use in the bit map.  Since deleting files does
not zero their content, but does free their bitmap bits, this is a
much more effective way to copy/backup a ProDOS volume,
or any file system that keeps track of free space--which should
be all of them.  ;-)

ShrinkIt disk imaging is a special case, because ShrinkIt does
not make any determination of or assumption about the file system
of the disk it is imaging--perhaps appropriate for 5.25" disks, but
dubious for anything larger.

A better approach would be to prompt the user with the recognized
file system (if it is recognizable) and allow the user to override the
assumption if it is known to be incorrect.

-michael

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