Disk zeroing utilities for Apple 2 series ?

[Keatah]

Disk Zeroing utilities. Are there any for the Apple 2 series?

 

A Disk Zeroing utility works pretty much like it sounds. It looks at the un-used space on a disk and writes zeros. On the PC there are plenty of these utilities, sold under the premise they provide security and prevent data recovery & undelete.

 

And what about defraggers? I know (and use) something called Beach.Comber, I believe this program puts all the information on a disk at the front and in a contiguous form. Similar to a modern-day defragger and file placement utility. But it doesn't do anything to erase un-allocated / un-used sectors, and it's for PRODOS only.

 

I took it upon myself to write a simple utility. And the task can be done entirely in Applesoft Basic. It zero-fills the un-used sectors on a DOS 3.2, 3.3, or PRODOS disk. But I want to know if there are other utilities out there, or even if this has been done before.

 

My motivation here isn't security, but instead saving space when compressing disk images or even hard drive images.

[ianoid]

A good deal of archived dsk files are zipped, which saves space. Even then, why would halving or quartering archived files matter, since storage is so cheap? I just put the entire Asimov archive on a 16GB compact flash card with room to space, including all the archived 1, 3, and IIgs- in addition to Apple II. Alright, I didn't include the French, German or other language stuff.

[Keatah]

A good deal of archived dsk files are zipped, which saves space. Even then, why would halving or quartering archived files matter, since storage is so cheap?

Storage space is indeed cheap. Technically it wouldn't matter. But nonetheless I had a handful of images I wanted to shrink down as small as possible. And after that it became an academic exercise. Just how sloppy is the Apple II filing system? Just as bad as any Windows' (or other) based system.

[Rybags]

In an emulated environment it might be easier to just copy out the files to fresh images.

 

If by external utility, obviously the best method would be to allow zeroing to be done in a batch environment, e.g. process all eligible files in a directory with no required user intervention.