Compare archive and folder

Posts: 5 · di2ger 28 Mar 2012, 20:13

I've failed to realize, how can I compare archive and folder (without manual
extraction)?
Is it really impossible? I've searched the whole Internet and didn't find
freeware to do this.
Please, help.

Posts: 7210 · Zenju 29 Mar 2012, 09:48

It seems there exist a few tools that can mount archives as folders:
http://www.google.de/?q=mount+zip+folder+windows

Posts: 5 · di2ger 29 Mar 2012, 18:23

Thanks for reply!
But it is even longer, than to extract it!
Is it possible to add archives support to FreeFileSync?
It would be very good.

Posts: 7210 · Zenju 30 Mar 2012, 13:39

There exists a corresponding feature request:
[404, Invalid URL: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3041854&group_id=234430&atid=1093083]

Reading from an archive is relatively easy, but there is one major problem
that needs to be conceptually solved: Transactional behavior in automatic
mode. This is one huge open topic.

Posts: 5 · di2ger 30 Mar 2012, 19:23

Read-only access to archives would be great!
What do you mean by 'Transactional behavior'?

Posts: 7210 · Zenju 31 Mar 2012, 10:23

"do all or nothing" behavior in case of failure. This is difficult for an
archive where all files implicitly depend on each other, in contrast to a hard
disk, where individual files can be changed without effecting others.

Posts: 5 · di2ger 31 Mar 2012, 21:00

As I understand, if we access to archives read-only, we always 'do nothing' to
it.

If you are talking about archive modification, then you could apply all
modifications to duplicate archive, test it's integrity and only then delete
original archive and rename result archive. Only 2 disadvantages of this
approach is time, consumed by creating archive duplicate and additional disk
space for duplicate.
We could call it 'Safe archive handling mode' and make it optional.

But anyway even read-only access to archives would be great advantage for
FreeFileSync.