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From: jm9t+@andrew.cmu.edu (Josh Brian Mastronarde)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc
Subject: Re: Norton QUerase and .ZIP files
Message-ID: <MbMncYq00UzxE4B4RX@andrew.cmu.edu>
Date: 10 Dec 90 07:32:52 GMT
References: <4512@idunno.Princeton.EDU> <76686@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu>,
	<1990Dec10.025135.21727@xrtll.uucp>
Organization: Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA
Lines: 19
In-Reply-To: <1990Dec10.025135.21727@xrtll.uucp>

I'd just like to put my 2 cents in on this.  Unerasing files on a
regular basis is a dangerous idea, if you care about the files you are
Zipping.  Unless you hard disk is completely unfragmented (very
unlikely) all the time, chances are the zip file will NOT be intact.  It
might work if you only deleted the one .zip file and then tried to
recover it (as when you accidentally delete a file, which is what
Unerasing was meant for), but when you delete all the other files in the
directory too, DOS doesn't keep track of which unused cluster came from
which erased file.  Unerasing programs take their best guess (usually
trying the next sequential free clusters), and if there was any
fragmentation at all, the newly freed clusters are not in order by file.
 So you will almost always get pieces of the .zip file mixed with the
other files you deleted.  The best solutions:  either use the -m option
of PKZIP, copy the .zip file to another directory before deleting all
the files, or you could try using ATTRIB to hide the file first.  But I
guarantee you if you keep trying to unerase the .zip file, you will lose
your data almost all of the time.  Hope this helps,
                        \\\ Josh Mastronarde ///
                        \\\ jm9t+@andrew.cmu.edu ///