Author: Copyright (C) 2014 by CiderPress authors

Convert Disk Image to File Archive

This feature extracts every file it can find in a disk image and stores it in a ShrinkIt archive. This is similar to extracting all files with "preservation mode" enabled and re-adding them, but is faster and easier. It can be used in conjunction with "convert file archive to disk image" to resize a ProDOS volume.

Open a disk image and highlight the files you want to convert. Items will be converted in the order that they appear, so if you want to leave the order undisturbed make sure you have them sorted in the original order (more information on this). Select "Convert to file archive..." from the Actions menu.

The "Preserve empty folders" feature is useful when you plan to convert the file archive back to a disk archive, perhaps after modifying some files or just choosing a different disk size. The ShrinkIt archive format describes a way to store empty folders, but it has never been used by any ShrinkIt utility and could cause some software to break. Instead, CiderPress creates standard zero-length file entries with the name ".$$EmptyFolder". These are automatically dropped when converting to a disk archive, but will appear as normal entries in the archive. This option should therefore be enabled only when you plan to convert back to a disk image.

The selected default compression will be used when creating the ShrinkIt archive.

Text files on DOS 3.2/3.3 and RDOS disks (file type 'T') will be converted to ProDOS format. This involves stripping "high ASCII" text from the file.

For performance reasons this feature holds most of the files in memory during the operation, making this somewhat memory-intensive. If you are working with 32MB hard drive partitions, performance on systems with insufficient RAM may suffer.

Files in embedded volumes, such as a DOS volume inside an 800K ProDOS disk, can be converted. However, they become just like any other file, and if the file archive is converted back to a disk image they will no longer be stored in an embedded volume.