Incremental Archive

[john lodge]

I have just started using Archive creator and I cannnot see anything about incremental archive either in the existing product or to any extent in the discussions (though I may have missed something.

I have about 5 CD's of pictures and it is growing. When I edit and change a picture it usually is in the same directory structure. It would be good if archive creator could work against an existing atrchive and its on-line form to determine what addirtional files need to be achived and to add them to the archive. The same mechanism can be used to append pictures that have failed to compare.

...John

[MichaelT]

John,

Thanks for your feedback. Rather than re-state what has already been discussed, let me please ask you to check out these previous discussions that have taken place, and then if you have any further questions and suggestions, we can address them.

Thanks for your feedback...

http://www.pictureflow.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=577&highlight=incremental

http://www.pictureflow.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=495&highlight=incremental

http://www.pictureflow.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=469&highlight=incremental

http://www.pictureflow.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=462&highlight=incremental

[john lodge]

Yes I have seen what has been said before. It is just that it does not seem to fully address the problem.

There is really a need to solve the indexing problem with incremental. I can see my archive growing to 20Gig or so where it will span about 20 CD's. Restarting is not just a few CD's down the drain it is a whole lot of time as well even with the fast CD's.

Had you used packet writes, incrementally updating a CD would not be a problematic as you portray, the capacity would have been a little lower but that is not a particular issue.

I certainly think you are on the right track in delivering a product that keeps the format open. I have Kodachromes that are 30 years old, and that only scratches the surface. Digital photos need to be stored in an open way on a media that has some lasting potential.

And no I did not expact to see all issues solved from the get go.

...John

[MichaelT]

We view the incremental as a matter of doing a bunch of smaller Archives over time, and then linking the smaller archives by a master Archive database. That is where we are heading.

Packet writing is not relaible enough in our opionion for an archive.

We have many thoughts and we will address the incremental issue over time.

We appreciate your feedback and we will depend on our users to drive AC into the right final direction.

Thanks for your feedback. We will keep it in mind as we progress..

[john lodge]

If those separate archives able to deal with a single directory hierachy if so they may be OK.

But if this solution means as well that each archive is a separate directory structure or, if the user needs to go into the directory structure and identify what to archive then this is much more error prone than it needs to be.

...John

[MichaelT]

The incremental archives will be able to be done by the archive bit (un reliable because all programs have acces to it), and by date (archive all in these paths that have been modified after this date).

So I think that between these the user can be quite sure that he/she gets all the files..

As AC develops it will grow in sophistocation (while we do our best to keep its implicity).

Thanks..

[john lodge]

Sounds good, yes the archive bit is a problem you could do better with XP and with NTFS (use another fork) but that is getting specific and it has its own issues.

Thanks...
...John