Creating a huge archive

[motorollin]

I have a partition with over 1GB of data. I need to create an archive of it on my Mac. I have mounted an smbfs share which I can write to. I am using the following command:

lha -r a mac:archive.lha hd1:#?

The file is created with a size of 1 byte and my RAM gradually shrinks, but the lha on the Mac never gets any bigger. I have successfully used this method with a smaller partition (about 45MB). I'm assuming the problem is because size of the data is bigger than the amount of available RAM. Is there any other way of making an archive which will allow me to create such a large file?

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moto

[ChaosLord]

I have made huge archives many times.

The secret trick is to assign T: to your HD somewhere like this:

Assign T: Work:


Also I advise you to create the archive directly onto your amiga somewhere if you have the space for it.  I am afraid it will take over 24 hours if you do it over the network.  But you are free to try whatever you like. :-)  Your smbfs may be new/faster/better than mine.

Also I like to addbuffers 2048 to wherever T: gets assigned and also the partition you are archiving.  This speeds things up.


And make sure you are using a RELIABLE version of lha.  Any lha 1.x is good.  Most lha 2.x will create corrupt archives of huge data.  I learned that the hard way. :cry:

[motorollin]

Ahhhh, so that's why it fill up RAM:, because it creates the archive in T: :-) I'll assign T: to Work: and try again. I don't have another partition large enough to hold the archive. Can I create it on the same partition? E.g.:

lha -r a hd1:archive.lha hd1:#?

--
moto

[darksun9210]

if you are really brave you could have a mount point on the mac assigned as an amiga drive via samba, and point T: to the network share.

as for creating the lha file in the root of the drive you are creating the lha from, it should work.

[Vulture]

if I were u I'd use lzx instead, it's potentialy faster and usually more reliable. I think thre's unlzx for mac.

[keropi]

I needed to make a ~100MB LHA with many small files... so I took the HD to the pc, and using AF2006 I mounted it. and made the archive on the pc with the AF Dopus... works excellent!
remember not to boot from your amiga HD, but from the AF2006 pre-installed OS.

[motorollin]

@Vulture
Too late to use LZX now, it's still archiving 12 hours later and I don't want to stop it :-)

@Keropi
I would try that, but the HDD is SCSI and I don't have access to a PC (let alone one with SCSI support).

This is a one-off, so leaving it archiving across the network is acceptable just this once even if it takes 24 hours.

--
moto

[Vulture]

good luck then

[motorollin]

Thanks :-) Is extracting the archive a good enough test of whether the data inside it is valid? Or is there any way to compare the contents of the archive with the original files to check them?

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moto

[hamtronix]

theres probably copyright material in that archive so this thread should be removed

[motorollin]

hamtronix wrote:
theres probably copyright material in that archive so this thread should be removed

WTF? It's a backup of my own hard drive you know?

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moto

[jj]

im guessing he was joking, or if not then he must be a bit of a mentalist

[ChaosLord]

motorollin wrote:
Too late to use LZX now, it's still archiving 12 hours later and I don't want to stop it :-)

1. I forgot to tell you to install PoolMem in your ss, else ur memory will get fragged and lha will slow to a crawl.

2. lzx is much slower at creating archives than lha.  I have tested and documented this many times.

[DamageX]

Yeah, definitely try extracting the archive as a test. If there are no error messages then odds are it's all good.

I backed up my Amiga HD by making a big lha file one time and later I found the archive to be corrupt. Actually it was just one file, but the Amiga lha utility that I used seemed to "give up" when it got to that file. I was able to extract the rest of the archive using a windoze utility.

[motorollin]

Well I extracted both of the archives and no errors occurred, except for a few files in the archived MakeCD drawer which said something like the file could not be created or found or something. Not really a problem as I can just reinstall it. I'm starting to move stuff in to their right locations and haven't found any duff files yet so I suppose it's ok :-)

Thanks for the help

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moto