Re: 3.5" Disk archiving

[Andy McFadden <fadden@fadden.com>]

Tom Zuchowski <tzuchow@attglobal.net> wrote:
> The only way to avoid this is to format a fresh floppy, copy all of the
> files onto it, and archive it before any files are erased. For DOS 3.3,
> further savings can be realized by using Copy II+ or equivalent utility to
> make a DOS-less disk.

Or use a "disk zap" utility that zeroes out the empty sectors.  I believe
ProDOS 8 ShrinkIt 3.4 provided this feature, for exactly this reason.

I remember Andy Nicholas talking about adding the warning.  People were
posting files to online services as disk archives, which was spectacularly
inconvenient for some (consider what it's like to unpack an 800K disk
image with 512K of RAM and no hard drive, especially when all you want
to do is check the README or look at a couple of files).

The warning was added to encourage people to use file archives.  Now that
emulators are so common, disk archives are probably more conveninent.

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