gjs@faust.UUCP (02/16/87)
> Has anyone out there used FASTBACK? If so, I would welcome any > informed comments (good or bad) regarding it. FASTBACK has a number of nice features: - It is no longer copy protected. - It is fast. I average about a megabyte a minute on 360KB floppies, including disk change time. - You can do incremental backups. These can be appended to your full backup, starting on the last (partially filled) disk. - FASTBACK maintains an on-line catalog, which you can browse to find all backups (versions) of a file, then restore the one you want. Browsing and searching are pretty fast. - You can use a control file to specify multiple file specs to be backed up, and other options. You can simulate multiple catalogs (backup sets) by renaming the catalog file. I use two catalogs. One, for large files that change frequently, I always back up to the same three floppies. The other is an incremental backup onto the tail of my last full backup. The idea is not to let multiple copies of system log, databases, editor swap file, etc. from expanding my incremental backup too fast. My daily backup takes 2 to 3 minutes (faster than most tapes!). The floppy format is not readable via DOS commands. The command line is not well designed. Parameters are purely positional, and values are not checked, so it's easy to make a mistake. For example, FASTBACK will take "c:\etc\*.*" as a valid answer to a "yes/no" option. You may not want to abort a backup when you see it's going wrong (see next paragraph). I only run FASTBACK from carefully constructed batch files. FASTBACK has one major bug: if you abort an incremental backup, even before it writes anything to the disk set, the backup catalog is deleted. This means you cannot do further incremental backups to that backup set. You can still restore files from the set, but the RESTORE utility must now search through the floppies one by one to find a file. -- George Snyder -- Intermetrics Inc. -- gjs@inmet --
jvc@mirror.UUCP (03/03/87)
I've been reading the responses to this base note because I'm also
interested in finding a good backup utility. However, most of the
negative responses have been little use in judging FASTBACK because
the authors of those responses have not indicated what version they
were using. I think the current version is around 5.1.
When trying to decide which software package to buy, the bugs of past
versions are of little interest as long as they've been fixed (there
will be some interest if one is trying to judge the track record).
I am not saying that those who are using (have used) previous versions
should not respond. Their input would be valuable to those trying to
decide whether to upgrade or not. What I am saying is that the input
is worthless unless the version number is included.
This applies to all evaluations of software.
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Jim Champeaux jvc@mirror.TMC.COM
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