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:why?

[MarcoPon]

That's an interesting property, but what's the use case?

I can't say I know them all, or even the best/killer ones, but I listed some on the readme. Probably the most immediate/interesting application would be on a digital camera, for photos/video.

Can apps read files inside an sbx container?

Yes. The blocks are of a fixed size, so the format is seekable and reading from it is far simpler than, say, reading from a ZIP file.

Re: Not to seems like a philistine...

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash storage uses wear leveling, which can fail. If that happens, the flash chip can mostly still be read, but all erase blocks on the chip will be in a "random" order compared to the lost logical wear leveled position. Then you want a way to recover the logical order of the blocks, which this format allows you to do.