Developer Shares A Recoverable Container Format That's File System Agnostic (github.com)

Long-time Slashdot reader MarcoPon writes: I created a thing: SeqBox. It's an archive/container format (and corresponding suite of tools) with some interesting and unique features. Basically an SBX file is composed of a series of sector-sized blocks with a small header with a recognizable signature, integrity check, info about the file they belong to, and a sequence number. The results of this encoding is the ability to recover an SBX container even if the file system is corrupted, completely lost or just unknown, no matter how much the file is fragmented.

Comments

Re:Fail?

[MarcoPon]

The default block size used is 512 bytes, which is a suitable sub-multiple of every sector size used by most system after the CP/M days. One example of system that doesn't plays well with is Amiga Old File System (which use 488 bytes per blocks, IIRC). Actually it's the only FS/platform that I found not working, among the ones I managed to test (a bit over 20, I listed them in the readme, just above the tech spec).

This would be great for SSDs

[Gravis Zero]

Unlike HDD controllers, SSD controller do wear-leveling, so there is no guarantee that your data will be written as as a contiguous block of memory (regardless of what the filesystem says), only that it will be in 4096 byte blocks. Recovering deleted data from a SSD is no simple task because it means you need to know or guess the controller behavior for wear-leveling in order to go back and find the order of previously written data. With this you would be able to just read the raw memory even after the controller has been reset and still be able to recover the data. I think it would be a nice option to have a filesystem be able to encode user files in something like this highly recoverable format. The only real problem is that the file has to be completely rewritten even if you only modify part it in order to differentiate the new version from the old version.