Archive types: How do they differ: .Tar, .zip, .cab, .bh, ?

[TomBilliodeaux]

I zipped a director with Powerarchiver using the .tar type.
18 Files were archived.
Same with .cab, bh(black hole), .tar.gz, ----18files

But when zipped the same directory using standard .zip type,

26 files were Archived.

Comparison indeed showed that the .zip included filed the other archive types omitted.

What is the difference and why would anyone use an archive method that omits files?

 

[geoff2k]

What files were omitted? Depending on the version of tar you use (and there are many out there for win32), it may or it may not ignore hidden and system files.

 

[TomBilliodeaux]

Here are the files that were omitted:
Aspichk.exe
beacon_e.zip
Frcasp~1.zip
Hotburn_Demo.exe
Hp5200scanz69en.exe
log.txt
Neroerror.txt
SonyabCD1.5Update.zip
SonyCDExtremeupdate1.3.380.zip
SonyCRXproblem.rtf
XClone13.zip

Here are some files like these that were included:

autorun.zip
x86_2195bootSvr1.exe
CDRWin38.exe
*.ipg (all ipg were included)
Win2k_bs.zip

 

[geoff2k]

What are the attributes (right-click properties) of the files that were omitted? Are they all read-only / hidden / system?

 

[TomBilliodeaux]

All the zip files were not hidden nor system files.
I did not check the exe files but most were archive.

 

[TomBilliodeaux]

Ok, This may help.
I noticed that most of the missing files resided in subdirectories (even though some of the files in the subdirectories were included which further confused).
So I choose a small directory without any sub's - 7files with types:.exe,.txt, .dat,.hlp, .log etc

Directory was G:\Cdrwin with 7 files totaling 1150kb.
Using PowerArchive utility:
Results: .tar archive: all 7 files were included - compressed to 1124kb
.cab archive: all 7 files were included - compressed to 384kb
.zip archive: all 7 files were included - compressed to 444kb

the cab and zip extracted properly. Did not bother with the .tar.

Seems like PowerArchive does not read subdirectories well with other than .zip formats.
I like to use it because Winzip8.0 does not recognize .cab, .tar formats.

I am trying to clone my W2k directory to a CD. It is 1.7G and would like to fit it on 1 CD. Don't know if I can span CD's.
Perhaps someone may suggest a better way.

 

[Descend492]

winrar's the best I've found. It shrinks things down to nothing

 

[TomBilliodeaux]

Thanks Descend,
where can it be found?

 

[Moonbender]

You can get WinRAR (and heaps of other compression proggies) at Tucows. My German mirror is www.tucows.de, but there might be a faster one for you at tucows.com.
RAR and ACE are the two compression programs that generally end in the best results ... I use WinACE (which can also be found at Tucows) right now, but WinRAR is great, too.

 

[geoff2k]

rar can also be found at rarsoft. I use the command-line version myself, and it allows you to break your archive up over volumes of the same size. So for example, if you wanted to create an archive from your C:\WINNT\ directory that was broken up into chunks of 640000000 bytes each, you could do a:

rar a -r -v640000000b d:\archive.rar c:\winnt\

and you could easily burn those onto CD. There's probably a way to do this through the winrar GUI as well, but that's left as an exercise to the reader.

 

[TomBilliodeaux]

Thanks. Just what I'm looking for.