CompressedDiskImage

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It is useful to be able to fit a SEED installation onto the internal disk of a laptop. A full SEED installation can take 70GB of disk or more; current Mac laptops have a maximum of 80GB internal disk drive available. In order to wedge a SEED installation onto such a machine, we may take advantage of the ability of MacOS to create and use a compressed readonly disk image for holding some of the large static data in a SEED installation, namely the precomputed similarities and portions of the non-redundant database.

One can create a compressed disk image by following this procedure.

1. Create a directory structure from which the disk image should be created.

cd /Users/fig/FIGdisk/FIG/Data 
mkdir Readonly 
mv NR Sims Readonly 

We will move the directories back out after we are finished.

2. Create the compressed filesystem from the data. This will take some time; on a G4 Powerbook using a firewire disk, it took a little under four hours to convert a 47G directory to a 15G compressed image.

hdiutil create -volname SeedStaticData -format UDZO -srcfolder Readonly -fs 'HFS+' /tmp/seed_uncompressed 

Note: This will not work with hdiutil from OSX 10.3.9 because there is a problem making images > 8GB, and the create will fail with this error:

 hdiutil: convert failed - image/device is too large 

3. Move the data directories back.

mv Readonly/NR Readonly/Sims . 

We now have the compressed filesystem image.

4. To mount the image, do this:

hdiutil attach -noverify -mountpoint /Users/fig/FIGdisk/FIG/Data/readonly /tmp/seed_uncompressed.dmg