[net.micro.mac] Wanted: Backup Util for HD

siritzky@acf2.UUCP (Brian Siritzky) (08/19/86)

I am looking for a utility to backup a 20 meg hard disk.
I needn't be incremental, but it would be good if it were.


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Brian Siritzky, C.I.M.S., 251 Mercer Street, New York, NY 10012
		uucp : ...cmcl2!acf2!siritzky
		ARPA : siritzky@nyu
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chuq@sun.uucp (Chuq Von Rospach; Lord of the OtherRealms) (08/19/86)

> I am looking for a utility to backup a 20 meg hard disk.
> I needn't be incremental, but it would be good if it were.

I've seen two.  One is shareware, one is commercial.

The shareware program is called macdump.  It is set up similar to the
Unix (TM) dump/restore programs.  You dump a HD volume with a given level
(0 for full dump, 1-9 for incrementals).  It only works with the new ROM's,
from what I can tell.  I haven't used because of that, but it seems
reasonable. It was posted to net.micro.mac a while back, and I have a copy
around here somewhere....

The commercial product is PCPC's HFS Backup. It runs about $40, works with
either the old ROM's (running RAM HFS) or the new ROM's.  It will back up to
either 400K or 800K floppies (defaults to 800K).  When you start it up, it
reads a backup directory and gives you a list of everything that has been
added or changed since the last backup.  You can modify or override the list
if you want, and then back it up.  I've found, for instance, that Microsoft
Word keeps some information in a resource and almost always ends up on the
Backup list.  So does the Imagewriter file.  

I rely heavily on HFS Backup and it seems to work fine.  I've rebuilt the
HD from scratch with it.  It is fast, and it is supported by a real company
(PCPC makes the MacBottom HD) rather than shareware.  

My only gripe is that it doesn't try to optimize floppies.  Every time you
run HFS backup, it requires at least one floppy.  If you do a full dump
and then back things up every night, you can use a lot of floppies that
way.  It would be nice to have a couple levels of incremental backups (as in
MacDump above) so you could keep the number of floppies reasonable.

Here's how I use it, by the way.  Keep two sets of backup floppies:  the 
current set and the old set.  Each set is about 25 floppies.  Do a full
dump, and then every day or so (depending on how much work you're willing to
lose -- I tend to do a dump when I'm at a convenient breaking point) do
an incremental.  When you use up all 25 floppies, put them somewhere and do
a new full dump with the other set.  That way, you have a backup of your
backup in case something happens and you won't lose everything.

chuq


-- 
Chuq Von Rospach	chuq%plaid@sun.COM	 Delphi: CHUQ
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