Patent Application
20080010323
As shown in
The source medium 12 includes a mange space 16 and a data space 18, wherein the mange space 16 stores a partition table, an active program, a file table, and son on. The data space 18 stores at least a file, which may be data file, execution file, video file, audio file, and so on. The file table is the file allocation table (FAT) in the Windows® system or other relative tables in different operating systems, in which names of files and addresses of fragments of the files in the data space 18. The file system of the source medium 12 is as same as the common storage media.
As shown in
First, reading the data in the manage space 16 of the source medium 12, and analyzing the file table. The analyzing result is recorded in a duplication table and stored in the memory of the duplicator 10. The content of the duplication table includes addresses of clusters of the fragments of files in the manage space 16 and data space 18, and ranking the addresses in an order of clusters.
Basically, the file table indicates the contribution of the files in the medium. The file table has different names in different operating system, such as FAT 12/16/32 in DOS system, BITMAP in NEFS system . . . , and has different contents in different operating system. Some of them list the used or not-used clusters, some of them list the corresponding files and the used clusters, and some of them only list the used or not-used clusters. No matter or what kinds of the file tables, we can analyze the content of the file table to get the clusters of the source media 12 for duplication.
Next, reading the data of the source media 12 according to the file table and copying them to the target media 14 at the corresponding addresses in sequence.
According to the method of the present invention, the duplication is in an order of clusters instead of files. The read/write heads of the source and target media 12, 14 utilizing the method of the present invention move from the first cluster to the last cluster of the media in sequence rather than jump between the file table in the manage space and the fragments in the data space of the conventional duplication system that shorts the duplicating time much.
Another character of the method of the present invention is that it doesn't need to formalize the target media prior to duplication, the format process is done in the duplication. The file table is stored in the memory of the duplicator, so that the file table is utilized in the next time duplication of the same source medium.
It is preferred that the source medium 12 and the target media 14 have the same storage capacity for the duplicating method of the present invention. It is required to check whether the storage capacity of the source medium 12 and the target media 14 are the same, if do, then the method of the present invention may perform functionally. If the storage capacity of the source medium 12 and the target media 14 are different, the method of the present invention has to make some adjustment before performing.
In addition, in duplication of data, a duplicating order may copy a continuous fragment of data. If the fragments of data are short and discontinuous, ever duplicating order only copies a short datum, in other words, the bandwidth is occupied by the duplicating orders rather than the duplicating data. To overcome the problem above, we can calculate a suitable duplicating section, which may be two clusters to hundreds of clusters, for duplication. In the duplicating section, there may be invalid data copied, but the times of duplicating orders are reduced that may shorten the time of duplication. This process is powerful when the effective data of the medium are discontinuous and short.
