From: strnlght@netcom.com (David Sternlight)
Subject: Re: What's your opinion of SpaceSaver?
Date: Tue, 25 Aug 92 20:04:45 GMT
Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services (408 241-9760 guest)


Peter Sweeney asks about Stuffit Space Saver vs. Auto Doubler. Doubtless
others will be posting speed and size comparisons, so I'll confine
my remarks to integration issues.

It's best if one uses either Space Saver and the new Stuffit Deluxe
3.0 or AutoDoubler and DiskDoubler in tandem, for various "bailout"
reasons if troubles arise with the space saving init/cdev (not enough
memory to install, wanting to use space saved files on another machine
with Stuffit/DiskDoubler but not the space saver extensions, etc.).

Thus, other things being equal, the question can be re-examined as one
of a preference between Stuffit Deluxe 3 and Disk Doubler. That
question seems easy to answer at the current state of things. SD3 is
faster than Disk Doubler, and produces comparably sized files, in my
testing. Stuffit has many more options and much more flexibility.
Stuffit and SD3-compatible files are at least an order of magnitude
more common on bulletin boards and other sources for downloading
files--at one point I think I recall the Disk Doubler people saying
their product wasn't intended for communicating compressed programs.
SD3 has a much more natural and user-friendly capability for managing
an archive of many pieces--folders and files--as is common with
sophisticated applications.

SD3 comes with several useful drag-and-drop icons which will convert
older Stuffit files, and Compact Pro files; which will compress or
expand files. I find these extraordinarily useful, and I almost never
invoke the main program itself.

Finally, now that SD3 is performance-comparable to Compact Pro, those
who feel a debt to Ray Lau for his original Stuffit, which started
the whole thing, can "return to the fold" while preserving the
efficiencies they like.

(Historical note: Bill Goodman's Compact Pro was, for a long time,
the space saving compression champion, so much so that the Disk
Doubler people finally abandoned their own algorithm and bought
his. That caused many, with regret, to switch from the Stuffit
family to other products. Stuffit Deluxe 3.0 is now about equal
in space saving to Compact Pro/Disk Doubler, and is faster and,
I think, more convenient to use. Moreover, Compact Pro does not
(yet?) have a disk space saving analogue to Space Saver or Auto
Doubler; it is a file compression utility alone.)

(Additional note: file compression utilities make files smaller.  They
were originally double-click launch applications. They are useful for
archiving and electronic transmission of files. Disk space saving
utilities are designed to save disk space, also by making files
smaller, but not as much, since they are designed to expand files very
rapidly as well, and thus use somewhat different methods.  One rarely
expands file compression-compressed files. One constantly expands disk
space saved files, usually by double-click launch, since those files
are intended to replace one's normal on-disk files. Thus the space
saving algorithms have to treat such issues as expanding the file,
running it, modifying it, and resaving it, all transparently so that
the user doesn't need to know he's using a space saving algorithm. All
the file compression algorithm has to deal with is making the file
smaller and bigger.)

Apologies to those who already know all this, but perhaps the detail
is useful to some readers.

David