Mirror
9.12.2001 - Mirror is dead...
Mirror was always intended as a q'n'd test implementation for Tobias. However, it was very fascinating to see, what impact a crappy leisure coded application can have to the internet. (Plus, I got 350000 hits on my homepage in just 3 months - Whoa...)
But now it's time for the real programmers. With SmartPAR, we finally have a working GUI client for the (W32) masses. So, I'll stop the development of Mirror. No further versions, no further support...
Update:
There is now a new version of the filespec, PAR 2.0. It uses not a file based but a block based approach. This makes the usage and understanding a bit more sophisticated, but it has many advantages:
- You can have more input files
- The parity file size is independent from the input file sizes. Now you can create 10 MB parity data for a single 700 MB image file...
- The variable block sizes may be the key to introduce segment based recovery for newsgroups...
I recommend using PAR 2.0. It is the next step in the evolution of the parity volume sets. For more info and clients go to:
http://parchive.sourceforge.net
A very nice client for PAR 2.0 is QuickPar. It can handle PAR 1 files too. More info at:
http://www.quickpar.org.uk/
You can download the latest (english) version mirrored here:
QuickPar-0.9.1.0.exe
For documentation, faq and historic research, the old Mirror stuff will be still here, but I don't recommed to use it anymore.
10.11.2001 - Version 0.2.6 released
Changes:
- If you have more than one dot in the name of your working directory (like C:\download\alt.binaries.multimedia\), old versions of Mirror crashed at volume set creation. This bug is fixed now.
- After file restoring, only the restored files will be checked -> faster
- Mirror is running at idle priority now -> Processing takes a bit longer, but Windows and other applications have more air to breathe...
download and release notes
A manual for creating parity volume sets
A manual for restoring files with a parity volume set
FAQ
3.11.2001 - Version 0.2.5 released
Changes:
- space checking works correct now, if a different destination is specified -> you can create parity volumes from files on CD again...
- Mirror responds to Windows messages -> not so much GUI freezes
- report window is now resizable
still present bugs:
- If Mirror is in the same directory as the input files, you may get a "kernel32" error at volume set creation.
Move Mirror to somewhere else in this case.
28.10.2001 - Version 0.2.4 released
Fixes:
- new file scanning routine: this fixes the last "%p"-bugs (hopefully)
Thanks to Valichi for testing.
- If you do not have enough disk space, the old versions create invalid parity volume sets, but tell you that they were created successfully. 0.2.4 will check the disk space and complains if it's not enough.
New features:
- Now you can tell the rename and restore routines, not to ask again for every file.
22.10.2001 - Damn bugs!
The "%p" bug is still persistent. It occures sometimes under NT (W2K, XP) systems. Maybe, Mirror can't open all files in the directory due to access restrictions - I'm investigating...
Until a fix, do the usual workaround: Copy the files, you want to process, to a extra directory.
BTW: I updated the FAQ with some questions, we came across during the latest discussions in several boards. A must read...
19.10.2001 - Version 0.2.3 released:
No changes to the format - it's fully compatible to 0.2.1+
New features:
-Progress bars!
They don't win a beauty contest, but now you know, what's going on...
15.10.2001 - Version 0.2.2 released:
This is a quick bugfix for the exceptions, when there are already open files in the directory...
14.10.2001 - Version 0.2.1 released:
This one comes with file format 1.0. It can still open the v0.9 volume sets created with Mirror 0.2.0, but Mirror 0.2.0 can't open the new file format. (Don't worry. If there are no big incidents, this will be the last format change for a long time...)
New features:
-Parameters!
Now you can associate Mirror with parity volumes.
It can't do this itself yet, you have to do it.
Either put it into "send to" or associate it with pars using "open with".
-it's faster now
-support for files not included in the parity data
(It can also detect nfo and sfv files and asks not to include them...)
-some minor bugfixes and corrections...