> Any time metadata is duplicated in a system (specifically, an interface or protocol), alarm bells go off for me. You might be very nervous to learn that most

> Any time metadata is duplicated in a system (specifically, an interface or protocol), alarm bells go off for me. You might be very nervous to learn that most filesystems duplicate some metadata in one way or another. FAT, NTFS MFT, ext4 superblocks and group descriptors come to my mind. In some level you ought to have duplicates; it's a matter of where to place them. ZIP's choice made sense at the time of smaller and slower disks. (I do think that the modern standard ZIP should make some fields scrubbed to prevent compatibility problems, though.)