New project: USB Drive Archiver

So I finished a simple little project for myself, a small program that can sit on a USB drive (no dependencies for Win32) and ZIP a directory onto the USB Drive (and unzip back to the computer).

I did this as my starter project for Delphi 2005. The biggest problem I had was finding the right ZIP library for the project. The best I found was ZipForge from ComponentArt. All Delphi, you can buy source, it doesn't cost much, and it even has a free version for personal use. Best of all, no dependency libraries!

One note: Delphi 2005 does come with a zip compression library...but it is totally stream based, and doesn't have a lot of documentation (like, how would you zip more than one file). I could have accomplished the same thing with the Delphi library, but it would have taken MUCH longer.

There are also a project call TZipMaster that I have used in the past, it is small, and open source -- but it requires that 2 static DLLs and a resource file exist on the machine. If you can live with that requirement, this project is fine. But again, I wanted no dependencies.

Now, why else did I do this? Well, my father needs a better backup solution, most of the time, when he does a backup, he just backs up the entire directory and calls it good -- to a 3.5" floppy! I tried just setting up some batch files to copy files to the USB drive for a zip solution, but that was really slow. So now, with the program to zip the directory onto the USB Drive, it takes a few seconds to do what used to take minutes!

Not bad.

Anyway, if I get enough people who are interested in this little program, I'll go ahead and purchase a license to the zip library and distribute the program. Right now I'm calling it the "USB Drive Archiver".