I am in the process of going through all of my computers, floppies, and CD's and archiving all of the software to a hard drive. I have an 80 GB Firewire HD connected to my beige G3, which has an internal Zip drive. I am using my external SCSI Zip drive to archive the HD's of my old computers and then transfer them to the Firewire drive via my beige G3.

There are many compression/archival programs and formats for Macintosh (.sea, .sit, .cpt, .img, .bin, .dmg, etc...). I have used all of these formats over the years. However, I would like to use one program and one format as a standard for this project, unless there is a strong reason to use multiple.

I am looking for the best format to use regardless of the OS or hardware. Any suggestions? I am also looking for opinions on imaging floppies and CD's vs. copying them to my hard drive and compressing them.

Thanks!