"ZODB is not rock solid" needs more comment. ZODB has pretty nice self-recovering abilities.
Almost nothing can go wrong with ZODB and FileStorage:
Unfortunately, something can. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=Data.fs+problem In particular : http://www.zopezen.org/Members/macguyver007/1005847669 ( published at Sep. 27. 02 ) To me it sounds like one more argument for "daily packing is good for you".
Any changes are added at the end of the file (okay, Toby reported that ZODB provides features that allow modification in the middle, but Zope does not use them).
You have the complete history, in case you must recover (or analyse).
Desaster recovery means, you cut away some trailing part of the "Data.fs"
I'm not sure this is relevant to what happens with packing.
Some improved version of Manage->ControlPanel->pack ? There are "ZODB.fsrecover" (for recovery) and "ZODB.fsdump" and the third party product "tranalyzer" for analysis
Thank you for the pointers.
I tried looking, but found nothing comparable to "Norton Disk Doctor".
I work under Unix. Therefore, I do not know (and usually do not need) "Norton Disk Doctor"
You have it invoked for you at startup - transparently ( it is called fsck ). In fact, Windows does the same thing these days, so I think that many newbie Windows users would also not understand my reference to NDD. I should have said not 'Norton Disk Doctor', but "some utility that fixes the broken filesystems and does it *really* well". Perhaps a combo of all three things that you've mentioned + 'pack' would be 'it'. Rgds.Paul.