>>I did, but it took minutes to restore few dozen megs from XML data. So I just kept it out of the later versions and stayed with good ole zipping.
>
>But what if, in 10 or 15 years, .ZIP is a thing of the past because all data is stored/backed up in Microsoft's 'big vault in the sky' and all users do is to say they need a special copy put to virtual place //xxxxx to run some special program against it?
>Our PCs might all be 128-bit based by then with no backward compatibility for 32-bit or 64-bit. What good would a .zip file be then in 30 years?

Zip is already more than 15 years old, and has become a de facto standard. I can still read zips created in 1990. This alone gives it a good head start.

And I somehow don't see how anyone will ever trust remote storage with anything important.