#MACPAR DELUXE UTILITY ARCHIVE#

The first problem to become apparent is the time and CPU effort required to generate Parchives and repair damaged files: coding to Parchive format proceeds at a little less than 50 MB/sec, so my test file typically took more than 6 minutes to turn into an ECC set. Once again, I used the Par2 standard in Parchives produced by MacPAR deLuxe, which remains the only ECC utility I have been able to locate for current macOS. To look at larger files, I produced another new version of my corruption app Vandal which can now produce low levels of damage in files of more than 1 GB, and used that to damage an 18.2 GB disk image test file. The warning sign came in one of the graphs in my previous article which looked at ECC on smaller files, in the relationship between original file size and maximum correctable damage. Unfortunately, their promise has yet to be realised, at least on macOS. If there’s one area for which error-correcting codes (ECC) would appear to be in greatest demand, it should be the storage of large files. Magnetic media such as tape and hard disk can readily extend to TB of storage, but at significant risk of data corruption over time.

#MACPAR DELUXE UTILITY ARCHIVE#

They’re also difficult and expensive to commit to removable archive media such as optical disks: conventional Blu-ray disks offer 25 or 50 GB, with 100 GB the current practical maximum.

Keeping multiple copies of very large files is expensive, and consumes storage at an alarming rate. Today I turn to look at the problems posed by much larger files, with sizes greater than 1 GB, which for many will include video and movies, virtual machines, and perhaps databases. In my quest for methods to preserve the integrity of files, I’ve so far considered almost exclusively those of modest size, such as still images and regular office-style documents.

Macpar deluxe utility