Future improvements: WIM repairing

Library to create, extract, and modify Windows Imaging (WIM) files

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Future improvements: WIM repairing

Forum: wimlib discussion

Creator: maxpat78

Created: 2013-06-12

Updated: 2013-09-05

maxpat78 - 2013-06-12

Hi,

actually I have had very few time to test your recent updates to wimlib, and to improve ImagePyX.

However, I've been thinking about a possible improvement: one useful tool to implement could be a "binary repairer", an app able to scan a broken WIM and detect/guess position of valid XML data and file resources, and, finally, reconstruct a valid WIM or some of its images.

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synchronicity - 2013-06-12

Hi,

The 1.4.2 release is just a couple bugfixes I had pending, so there shouldn't be much to test compared to the 1.4.1 release (which had a lot more changes). I've been busy with other things for the most part.

A binary repairer sounds interesting, although I haven't had this feature requested before. I'm not sure how often it would actually be useful to someone. In the event of file corruption due to a failing hard drive or otherwise generally you would want to restore from backup (if one exists, of course...) rather than use the corrupted data.

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maxpat78 - 2013-06-12

At some point, those guys at Info Zip put the "zip -FF" sub-command to recover broken ZIP archives: very few ZIP archivers can do that.

Surely, something similar would distinguish well wimlib-imagex from its MS counterpart, and give it a superior pedigree...

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maxpat78 - 2013-06-14

Another useful thing could be an option to pre-select more quickly the files to append to a new image, by comparing their date&times only instead of taking their SHA, in a way closer to common file archivers (this should speed-up common backup operations, preventing the analysis of the full input before the append pass).

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synchronicity - 2013-09-01

Hi, just to follow up on this: The last feature you suggested (pre-selecting files to append) has been implemented in wimlib v1.5.0. In wimlib-imagex this feature is exposed through the --update-of=[WIMFILE:]IMAGE option to wimlib-imagex capture and wimlib-imagex append.

It is also possible to create a "delta WIM" that contains just the streams not already present in some other WIM file.

Repairing WIM files has not yet been implemented.

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maxpat78 - 2013-09-05

Nice feature, thanks! This will really improve documents' backup speed in some scenarios of interest of mine.

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