dxxb@beta.lanl.gov (David W. Barts) (09/23/88)
We are looking for a utility to back up hard disks on our AutoCAD stations at Hanford. So far, I have been unable to find any commercially- available package thats satisfies all our criteria, namely: 1. The program must be capable of backing up to a 10- or 20-Mb Bernoulli drive. 2. The program must be capable of maintaining a heirarchy of daily, weekly, and monthly backups. 3. There must be a mechanism for listing any or all files on a backup cartridge. 4. There must be a provision for storing more than one backup on a single cartridge, as well as the ability to split a backup between several cartridges. 5. The user must be able to restore any file from the backup to any file on the hard disk. (This means that a utility like DOS backup that forces you to restore to the same name won't work.) 6. The program should try to anticipate error conditions as soon as possible. (There's nothing I despise more than a program that wastes 20 minutes of your time and bombs because of a simple problem that could have been detected early on.) 7. Along the same vein, it should be robust and try to recover from as many exception conditions as possible, instead of aborting and forcing the user to try again.) 8. The program should access the hard disk in a `clean' way (via the operating system, *not* through direct reads and writes.) We have lots of weird clones and nonstandard hard disk partitions (such as Compaq DOS 61 Mb) and any program that bypasses the system is asking for trouble. 9. Cost and/or volume discounts are also important, as we will be using it on about 40 stations. Reply by E-mail and not through postnews; I will summarize to the net. Thanks, David W. Barts, Ph. 509-373-4554 (FTS 440-4554), dxxb@lanl.GOV BCS Richland Inc. | 603 1/2 Guernsey St. P.O. Box 300, M/S S2-01 | Prosser, WA 99350 Richland, WA 99352 | Ph. 509-786-1024