I'll toss one more comment into the fray on this, too.  Older MS
compression schemes were quite error-prone.  I wouldn't use them
on a bet.  But the latest DS3 that comes with the Plus! pack
is quite good, actually.  In nearly three years, I have *never*, repeat,
never, had a read or write error using it.  And how extensive do I use
it?  Oh, how about DS-ing Visual Studio?  :)  (Mind you, just out of
old habit, I only DS the programs; I keep my own resulting development
files on an uncompressed partition.)  Sure enough, in November I lost
the hard drive.  But I was backed up (DAT tape), and I had no problem
restoring and mounting the compressed volume.  (There is a downside
here, and that is that if you have a compressed volume of say, 1 gig,
and it only has 400 mb of data, you're going to be backing up 600 mb
of empty space.  [But tapes are even cheaper than hard drives.]  :))
Plus, you won't be able to access the CVF from NT,
which is a PITA to me.)

In a nutshell, yes, hard drives are cheaper than they used to be.  But they
still aren't free.  :(  Many folks shun compression because they've been
playing with it since its inception, and they've been burned.  Sometimes
badly burned.  So was I.  But DS3 has convinced me that they've finally
worked the bugs out, and like I say, I've never had a problem using it
quite heavily for three years.

YMMV,

Lance

On 16 Jun 98, at 9:38, Kris Shapar wrote:

> Actually, Lance heard right, at least as far as DriveSpace goes: you can't
> compress FAT32 drives using DriveSpace. There's a message to this effect
> in the Win 98 Help files under "Freeing up disk space".
>
> However, I'd agree with your recommendation about not using compression
> unless you absolutely have to: I've had too many problems trying to read
> drives compressed with one version of DoubleSpace, DriveSpace, etc. that
> could not be read on machines using newer versions that hadn't ever had
> the earlier versions installed.
>
> Kris Shapar