Bachup entire hdd's onto a floppy or cd

hey guys,

as the kind of person i am, i think alot and come up with many idea that i never patneded and someone ends up with the same idea for nasa. anyways, i was thinking about backing up my hdd but, as everyone knows it takes about 50cd's for a full backup on a....40Gb hdd.

so i came up with this:

First, a little on how hdds work. the computer stores magnetic fields on the plates of the disk. these magnetic fields are read as binary (or hex or whatever)....

now, is it possible to create a program that reads the binary (like any other prog [os ect]) and display it instead of running objects off it. then, after it has read the binary, save it as a text file. this text file should easily fit onto a 3.25" floppy and definatley a cd.

then if something goes wrong, use that same program (the one that reads binary) to take the text file, and re-write all the binary values (or hex or whatever) to your hdd.

you get the general idea. i wont write anymore cause im not at home and the space bar is buggered. hehe.

what do you guys think. i know that it is possible....should i patended this idea ;) :P

Yea it seems possible. Yea i think you should patended your idea.

>seems like it is possible.

Here are the errors I see with this:

1) There is no such thing as a 3.25", there is a 3.5" and a 5.25" and that's it.
2) Your entire harddrive as a text file would be the same size.
- Example: a 40GB HDD would occupy a 40GB text file.
Binary is Binary, it isn't smaller when displayed as text.
1 byte will always be 1 byte, 1KB will be 1KB, 1MB will always be 1MB and 1GB will always be 1GB... Therefore a text file composed of your hard drive will still be 40GB and will not fit on a floppy.

if you dont believe HTRegz try uuencoding a binary and compare the sizes of the two files

U cant back up entire HDDS on cds u alredy said urself they are 40GB and even if u convert it onto a text file it still would be 40GB because Bytes are alredy codes 10MB=10MB(intext file format)

I would have to agree with HTregz


:D :D :D

yes, but maybe i didnt explain myself properly. i thought it was pretty basic.

with compression, it works by saying instead of 000000001 its just has 1. thats mainly how compression works.

the reason why the text file would be so large is because all of the binary would be copied into the text file making up millions of characters. the program would remove and double digits and replace it with a certain symbol. for example, if the binary was 11110001.

i will use "x" as the symbol that might be used

the the prog would work like this.

x1x01

the x's in this instace represent how many of the digits there are of the one following the x. i know it doent look like much in that binary. but a whole drive. plus the unused space doesnt need to be backuped.

i know my idea is very sketchy but with the right help it could become a working project

sounds great and stable....this would greatly change the computer industry and most of the world (or at least the ppart that has to do with tech)if u can get this program working send ma a beta verson il test it for ya :)

<edit> that has reduced the size of the hdd by just under 50%. which is heaps if you dont backup the unused space </edit>

yep. if anyone wants to help out with the idea, please let me know

il help but u got to tell me what i can do
im curently learning visual basic and c++ if thats helps in deciding
good luck man this could make u richer then bill gates....just never become so snoty like him
:)

TN123, Isn't that what all compression systems do ??

But since I'm a nice guy.. some info on the subject..

http://www.ams.org/new-in-math/cover/compression1.html

http://web.bham.ac.uk/wct883/research.htm

http://www.cs.duke.edu/csed/curious/compression/

and for the lazy people, atleast look at this: http://www.cs.duke.edu/csed/curious/...omparison.html