rlcarr@athena.mit.edu (Richard L. Carreiro) (10/07/90)
It's now time for me to get a hard drive backup program. Sooo, what should I get? Quarterback seems to have all the ads. Is it any good? What are it's advantages, disadvantages, problems? What else is out there? Whatever I get, it has to be able to back up to floppy, and it'd be nice if it could back up to SCSI tape or other things of that sort (in th even I ever bvuy such a thing...) -- Rich Carreiro The "War on Drugs" ARPA: rlcarr@athena.mit.edu is merely a smokescreen for UUCP: ...!mit-eddie!mit-athena!rlcarr The War on the Constitution BITNET: rlcarr@athena.mit.edu JITTLOV FOREVER!
mwm@raven.pa.dec.com (Mike (My Watch Has Windows) Meyer) (10/09/90)
In article <1990Oct6.210843.8398@athena.mit.edu> rlcarr@athena.mit.edu (Richard L. Carreiro) writes:
It's now time for me to get a hard drive backup program.
Sooo, what should I get? Quarterback seems to have all the ads.
Is it any good? What are it's advantages, disadvantages, problems?
QuarterBack doesn't seem to have any real competition. Everyone I know
who services the beasts claim it's the only thing to buy; there are
stores that _won't_ sell anything else, and stores where the answer to
the question "I want a backup program" is "I'll get quarterback. It's
fast, stable, and supported.
What else is out there?
There are a variety of hard disk backup systems on the Fish disks.
I've written a couple myself, but have dropped them all in favor of
ExpressCopy. MrBackup seems to be popular as a shareware package. The
reason I don't use any of the PD backup utilities is speed - they just
take to long. Backing up a 100Meg hard disk with one of them is an
all-weekend proposition. It's more like an evening with ExpressCopy.
If you want to roll your own, I recommend finding a copy of treewalk,
and using it's Rexx interface to prototype your system (that's how I
did mine). Note that floppy disk IO seems to be the overriding factor.
Whatever I get, it has to be able to back up to floppy, and
it'd be nice if it could back up to SCSI tape or other things
of that sort (in th even I ever bvuy such a thing...)
Many of the redistributable do that. QuarterBack does. ExpressCopy
doesn't.
My problem with quarterback is that it writes quarterback format
floppies. ExpressCopy is slightly slower, but otherwise similar (from
what I've heard), and creates AmigaDOS format floppies (either OFS or
FFS). ExpressCopy is also hard to find. I've been through one disk
crash with it, and was quite satisified with the results (though I'm
going to have to reorganize my backup scheme).
<mike
--
Es brillig war. Die schlichte Toven Mike Meyer
Wirrten und wimmelten in Waben; mwm@relay.pa.dec.com
Und aller-mumsige Burggoven decwrl!mwm
Die mohmem Rath' ausgraben.wschmidt@phobix (Wolfram Schmidt) (10/09/90)
In article <MWM.90Oct8133149@raven.pa.dec.com> mwm@raven.pa.dec.com (Mike (My Watch Has Windows) Meyer) writes: >In article <1990Oct6.210843.8398@athena.mit.edu> rlcarr@athena.mit.edu (Richard L. Carreiro) writes: [...] > Whatever I get, it has to be able to back up to floppy, and > it'd be nice if it could back up to SCSI tape or other things > of that sort (in th even I ever bvuy such a thing...) > >Many of the redistributable do that. QuarterBack does. ExpressCopy >doesn't. [...] The Quarterback manual sys that you can use Amiga(D)OS compatible tape drives. What does Amiga(D)OS compatible mean for CCS? Wolfram -- Wolfram Schmidt Regardless what some silly news software tries to tell you my email address is: wschmidt@iao.fhg.de wschmidt@IAO.FhG.de Wolfram Schmidt Teckstr. 11 W-7056 Weinstadt Germany +49-7151/62408 MET
ted@sbstaff2.cs.sunysb.edu (Dr. Ted Carnevale) (10/09/90)
I wish there were something as fast as PCTools' PCBACKUP. With the fast compression and disk writes/reads using that program, I would even be willing to give up the "security" of being able to use DOS to read individual files on backup disks.