del@pilchuck.Data-IO.COM (Erik Lindberg) (12/09/87)
I have seen many people slander Fastback for various reasons. To date I am not sure why they assume Fifth Generation systems is at fault. I have seen Fastback in use on dozens (literally > 20) of systems. I have seen problems, but they have *always* been attributed to the machine or installation, *never* to Fastback. In article <703@vaxine.UUCP> cpc@vaxine.UUCP (Chris Cullen) writes: >I have a 30-meg Seagate st238 RLL hard drive for my vanilla IBM PC, with an >Adaptec ACB-2070A RLL controller card. I had gone backup-less for quite a I am running exactly this configuration on one of my machines (oops, not vanilla IBM, it is a clone XT). On another machine I am running a Maxtor 1140 which formats to 196Meg using the 2070a. One of the partitions on the drive is 134Megabytes, which means a non-standard parsittion using non-standard sector sizes. Fastback has no trouble with either configuration. Just to make sure I wasn't fooling myself, before I wrote this message I restored the 30 Meg hard drive from scratch, and ran CRC's on 5 megabytes of files and found them to all be intact. >Fifth Generation systems, the makers. Didn't take long. And I quote: >"Yeah, we don't know anyone who's gotten RLL's to work with anything but >a Western Digital controller". You would think that a backup program only Personally, I would say that people don't tend to call F.G. just to say: "Hey, I just installed this with an ACB2070A and guess what? It works!" The Western Digital RLL controllers far outnumber Adaptec simply because almost every drive/controller combo, and virtually every hardcard is delivered with a WD controller. The fact they haven't heard of anyone that got it to work says nothing. He didn't say "No, this doesn't work with it". >As far as I'm concerned, Fastback is the ultimate trojan horse. I'm sure >it was not intentional. However, criminal negligence is certainly indicated. >It's obvious from the brief phone conversation that they KNOW that using >Fastback on some varieties of hardware (what OTHER configurations are also >problems?) will corrupt the source data. NOWHERE in their documentation What can I say about this statement, except that in my experience F.G. is a responsible company that listens to it's customers and has a genuine concern that their product work correctly. What I wonder is what your attitude was when you talked with F.G. such that they were unresponsive to your problem. You said you had a vanilla IBM PC. What revision? As I mentioned in the first line of this article, I *have* seen situations where Fastback had problems. In all but one case the problem was traceable to the BIOS, and replacing the BIOS with a decent BIOS cured the problem. The one other problem was a flakey floppy disk controller, and replacement effected a cure. I suggest you get a BIOS upgrade to an XT BIOS from IBM, or purchase a Phoenix BIOS (out of the computer shopper). Then try Fastback again. Of course, I doubt that you will pay any attention to this. >I can only recommend that you > A- NOT BUY FASTBACK > B- TELL EVERYONE YOU KNOW NOT TO BUY FASTBACK > C- QUESTION YOUR PRESENT BACKUP METHOD VERY CAREFULLY > I can only recommend that you A- BUY FASTBACK B- IF YOU HAVE TROUBLES, QUESTION YOUR MACHINE FIRST C- ALWAYS QUESTION YOUR PRESENT BACKUP METHOD VERY CAREFULLY -- del (Erik Lindberg) uw-beaver!tikal!pilchuck!del
cpc@vaxine.UUCP (Chris Cullen) (12/15/87)
In article <769@pilchuck.Data-IO.COM>, del@pilchuck.Data-IO.COM (Erik Lindberg) writes: > In article <703@vaxine.UUCP> cpc@vaxine.UUCP (Chris Cullen) writes: > >Fifth Generation systems, the makers. Didn't take long. And I quote: > >"Yeah, we don't know anyone who's gotten RLL's to work with anything but > >a Western Digital controller". You would think that a backup program only > > Personally, I would say that people don't tend to call F.G. just to say: > "Hey, I just installed this with an ACB2070A and guess what? It works!" > The Western Digital RLL controllers far outnumber Adaptec simply because > almost every drive/controller combo, and virtually every hardcard is > delivered with a WD controller. The fact they haven't heard of anyone that > got it to work says nothing. He didn't say "No, this doesn't work with it". > In fact, he did. I didn't include a tape recording of the entire conversation. (Although it sounds as if you could provide one. Please do.) The man did say "We know that with that configuration, it shuffles the file allocation table. We're not sure why, and we're trying to find out more from Adaptec." > >As far as I'm concerned, Fastback is the ultimate trojan horse. I'm sure > >it was not intentional. However, criminal negligence is certainly indicated. > >It's obvious from the brief phone conversation that they KNOW that using > >Fastback on some varieties of hardware (what OTHER configurations are also > >problems?) will corrupt the source data. NOWHERE in their documentation > > What can I say about this statement, except that in my experience F.G. is a > responsible company that listens to it's customers and has a genuine concern > that their product work correctly. What I wonder is what your attitude was > when you talked with F.G. such that they were unresponsive to your problem. I'm happy you've had good luck with Fastback. I'm not normally rude, and I was not then. I called up to ask if they knew if there was anything they knew about in their software that might cause the problem. Yelling at people doesn't usually get cooperation. I saved my yelling for the net where it might do somebody else some good. I don't expect software to be perfect. I write it for a living, and I dare say I've never written something without an obscure bug or two (I doubt anyone has). I also don't expect a vendor to be able to test their product with every configuration of hardware, an impossible task. I do think that when a serious bug is discovered, that a reasonable effort be made to inform people who might be affected. That's simple honesty. To not do so is dishonest. The argument that it's too expensive to update manuals just doesn't wash. They could have called the larger retailers (my vendor, PC Connection, maintains a database of hardware/software incompatibilities. I'm sorry I was the one to give the update to them, rather than Fifth Generation Systems.), or provided a zerox-copy tag-along sheet of cautions. -- Chris Cullen UUCP: {ucbvax!allegra,decvax}!encore!vaxine!cpc Automatix, Inc. Phone: 617-667-7900 x2066 1000 Technology Park Dr. Billerica, Mass. 01821