As
explained in my review of the Atari SH204 hard disk (Issue 26), the
process of backing up any hard disk onto floppies can be very slow
and laborious. A backup program is used to simplify the process by
organising the copying of each file and folder onto disks, and
asking for another when the current disk becomes full.
BACKUP'S DESKTOP
Backup is a GEM based program, and when loaded it
displays a set of icons on the left of its desktop. These icons
consist of one for each disk drive on the system (it is possible to
backup floppies too), and a single 'Path' icon which enables backups
of an individual folder (and its sub-folders). The menus available
are File, Options and Help (the help is of limited use).
File gives you the main control options, which
include 'Full backup' (copy every file on the specified drive /
path), 'Incremental backup' (using the flag set by TOS, as explained
in the SH204 review), and 'Backup by date' which allows you to
backup any files created after a given date. To use these, you
select an icon (and give the path if appropriate), and then select
the menu item. The backup then proceeds as dictated by the options
set.
OPTIONS
Options enables you to choose whether to format,
zero (a fast version of format) or leave the destination disk alone,
skip or copy system and hidden files, verify writes, set the number
of buffers, not segment files and update the 'history'. Write
verification is extra to the normal verify of the floppy, and if the
data is valuable (what isn't?) then this is useful extra security.
Non-segmentation of files is used to stop Backup splitting a file in
two if it does not fit in the space left on the current backup disk.
If you want to be able to use the files directly off the floppy,
then this is useful (see later). The history is a record kept on the
hard disk of each file that has been copied onto floppies, and may
be useful as an audit trail.
While backing up, a 'format' dialog is displayed,
which allows you to choose which drive to backup files onto (A: or
B:), and whether to format, zero or use as-is (useful to have the
choice again for each new floppy), and the drive/floppy type.
Available types are Single/Double sided, 80/40 track and 9 or 10
sectors per track, which allows you a great deal of flexibility, and
to get the maximum on the disk. The 40 track option is useful if you
have a 40 track 512 inch IBM type drive (on which disks are
cheaper), but the disks formatted cannot then be used on an IBM PC.
Restoration is done by selecting the icon and then
selecting 'Restore' in the file menu. Paths are supposed to work
too, but my version does not. This is disappointing as it would also
be nice to restore only a directory from a previous complete backup.
You can select a 'Don't overwrite files' option which stops an
existing file being overwritten by a restore, but this just stopped
the whole restore when I tried it. Due to these problems, I always
backup in 'don't segment' mode, which means I can do partial
restores using the normal GEM Desktop copying ability. Full drive
restores do work properly however.
Image backups and restores are available, which
mean that the Backup program will take copies of each individual
sector on the hard disk, regardless of what it may contain (file or
otherwise), and copy it to floppy. Restoration just copies it
straight back, overwriting anything that was there before. The
floppies created are useless to GEM Desktop, and the process is one
you should only use if you want to mirror the hard disk absolutely
at a later date. Image restores will overwrite everything new and
old, so use with caution.
PROBLEMS...
As you might have guessed, Backup is not without
fault. In fact, the faults are too numerous to list them all, but
they range from small and insignificant (the pointer at the format
dialog is a busy bee not an arrow), through bad program logic (after
giving a path, clicking on a new drive still uses it), to the
disastrous (it sometimes hangs for no apparent reason in the middle
of a backup - bad news 17 disks into the backup). When it hangs, you
have to reboot, which also loses your history file update. Backup is
also unable to backup the folder from which it is being run!
So much for problems, which can be sorted out in
updates (I hope), but what I would also like to see in future
versions is the ability to see, before a backup, a list of what is
likely to be backed up, and having an option to stop a file. This is
because I find it very wasteful to have BAK files and others on the
floppies, just because I forgot to delete them first (or didn't find
them). Also, as mentioned above, the ability to restore partial
directories or files from a larger backup should be provided.
CONCLUSION
Despite the problems, some major, I would not be
without this program (at the moment there is no competitor.
Microdeal must release a new version (and at low cost to existing
owners), but for the moment this is a great improvement on previous
backup methods.
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