Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!cmcl2!husc6!endor!olson
From: olson@endor.harvard.edu (Eric K. Olson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: HFS Flames
Message-ID: <3600@husc6.harvard.edu>
Date: 18 Dec 87 04:21:24 GMT
References: <3580@husc6.harvard.edu>
Sender: news@husc6.harvard.edu
Reply-To: olson@endor.UUCP (Eric K. Olson)
Organization: Lexington Software Design
Lines: 24

In a recent article THINK Technologies writes:
>Apple, in their infinite wisdom, removed file tags, and justified it by
>saying "If you can't restored data without file tags, then file tags are
>no help." Nonsense! File tags help restore the information, even if the
>directory structure gets lost. This would be nice.

File tags might have been useful for scavenging a disk if they had been
maintained properly and consistently.  In fact, they were of little value
and the added complexity of 524 byte sectors on hard disks made them more
trouble than they worth.

Floppies (MFS for sure and maybe HFS) when they're formatted have two
directories, but I believe the file system only updates one of them for
speed.

How about a compressing, error-correcting file system that can endure disk-
level data corruption to a degree?

-Eric


                                 I am not affiliated.
Eric K. Olson     olson@endor.harvard.edu     harvard!endor!olson     D0760
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