Compressed Virtual Folders?

[accolon]

I'm looking for something like the old DOS DriveSpace for my PPC, namely a tool that is able to compress data on-the-fly.

I'm thinking of compressed files that can be mounted as folders, not for regularly used applications, but for documents.

My problem:
I've got a database which is divided into 26 files (A, B, C...) with a total size of 12 MB. The files contain plain text, they can be compressed down to 4 MB with any ZIP tool. The program which accesses those files doesn't support compression, so I'm wasting rare space.

My idea:
It would be great to compress the files and make the OS "think" the archive was a folder, a simple gZIP would be more than enough. This method could be used to store files rarely needed without wasting memory.

My present solution is to gZIP each file with DEXPlor and decompress it manually the moment I need it.

Perhaps there's already a tool available that fits my needs, any ideas? Otherwise this would be a great feature for the next version of DEXPlor...

[Ainvar]

That does sound like a great feature to have for a PPC, especially for any file you may use once a week while in a meeting and taking notes and you need to keep all the notes. I would like to see if there is something out there for that or if someone with great coding talent can do this.


-Jay

[Dan East]

[accolon]

Would it be possible to change the algorithm used by the OS? A tool that replaces the file system driver like Jimmy's Landscape does with the graphics driver?

I'm just curious: the WinCE compression doesn't work for CF cards, just for the internal memory, right?

[Dan East]