CBFS Vault vs. ZIP

CBFS Vault is a filesystem first and foremost, a solution for storing and organizing named blocks of information. ZIP is a file format for storing various data in compressed form.

1. With adaptive compression you can choose a specific compression algorithm for each file, depending on its type. For example, you can use PPM compression for text files, RLE for bitmaps, and some LZ* compression for binary files. CBFS Vault supports different compression algorithms via events.

2. ZIP offers a limited choice of compression algorithms, most of which have a limited scope of availability across platforms and ZIP implementations. Moreover, control over the choice of algorithms is in many cases absent.

3. Encryption of a central directory is defined in APPNOTE of PKWare Corporation. It is not implemented by most ZIP libraries and components.

4. Strong encryption (AES, etc.) support was introduced independently by PKWare and WinZIP. These two formats are not compatible with each other and many implementations support neither.

5. In CBFS Vault, PKI-based encryption is implemented via events. In ZIP, PKI-based encryption is a proprietary extension used by PKWare and not licensed or implemented by any other library (though some libraries do implement the decryption part).

6. In most cases, if some pieces of data are broken in the CBFS Vault vault, only one or several files are affected. In the case of ZIP, if the central directory is damaged, the archive is completely lost.

7. In CBFS Vault, you can add, delete, or modify files inside the vault without rewriting the complete vault. Deletion and modification of files in a ZIP file requires that the complete archive is rewritten.

8. Most implementations do not support UTF8.

9. Support for files larger than 4GB requires ZIP64 support, which is missing from many ZIP implementations.