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Wiping files on compressed disks.
I did a few tests on wiping compressed (Stacker) files:
Sdir, the Stacker directory command, reported a 900k PKZip file
had a compression ratio of 1.0:1 (no compression).
I wiped the file using the same character repeatedly, and sdir
reported the resultant file had a compression ratio of 15.9:1
I wiped another copy of the zip file using sets of increasing
characters (0-255). After this wipe the compression ratio was
8.0:1
Lastly, I wiped the file using random characters, generated using
Turboc's random() function.
This time, the compression ratio was 1.0:1, the same as the
original.
Sounds like wiping with random characters may indeed be the way
to go to avoid "slack" at the end of the file.
One interesting note: When I fragmented the original zip file
into 50K segments with a "chop" program, sdir reported that each
segment had a compression ratio of 1.1:1, even though the
original file showed no compression.
When I created 10K segments, I got a compression ratio of 1.6:1
Pkzip however, was unable to compress these file segments at all.
I suspect that Stacker is not really compressing these smaller
files in the normal sense, but is storing them more efficiently
(better sector or cluster size?).
Jim Pinson