| Author | Message | ||
     Jimmy Weg (Jw) |
I just noted that a backup of an 80GB drive with normal compression produced a 6.8GB WHX file, while E01s of the same drive consumed 39.7GBs. WHX offers substantially better compression, but the ability to intrepret E01s is an advantage. I haven't tried the "better compression" feature, but I'd guess the results would be similar. There's clearly more important things on the agenda than making WHX interpretable. If that were to be done, would compression suffer to any great extent? Perhaps I can try a dd to an NTFS compressed folder, but that seems to yield the same ratio as E01. Keeping up with storage capacity is challenging. Thanks for your time! | ||
| Jens Kirschner (Admin3) |
I would not expect the WHX files to ever become interpretable. They are compressed in a way that makes interpretation impossible, as they would have to be decompressed *completely* in order to read structures from within. This approach makes them usable for backup purposes - the WHX files' specific use - but unusable for interpretation as such. If compression is an issue for you, you definitely should try using the "better compression" for e01. This may not yield the same results as the WHX compression but should definitely gain more then the regular one - no use putting that option in, if it weren't so. :-) | ||
| Jimmy Weg (Jw) |
Thanks, Jens. I tried again, using "better compresion," and the E01s consumed 39.3GB. The disk in question is a 68.4GB, which contains two NTFS partitions (41.0GB + 27.3GB) and total free space of 54.4GB. No NTFS compression is used on the volumes. Before I first imaged, I used WinHex to initialize u/c and slack. A day passed since the first imaging, but there wasn't much activity in the interim. | ||
| Jimmy Weg (Jw) |
Jens, I tried again with a different drive and achieved the results you predicted. It was a 34.2GB drive with two NTFS partitions. The "better compressed" E01s consumed 8.2GB. A WHX backup of the same drive, although made about two weeks ago, was about 8.3GB. I'm still not sure what happened with the first drive. Thanks again. | ||
| Jens Kirschner (Admin3) |
Compression used within WHX files differs from those in E01. Apparently, there is data that can be notably better compressed with the WHX approach and other data where the difference is smaller. I am not aware of a solution to this, as the E01s are supposed to be compatible to those created by "other" products... ;-) |