new@udel.EDU (09/19/89)
Not really on the virus track anymore... I've used Double-Back (of the DiskMechanic package by Lake Forest Login, Inc.) and found it to be very picky about the protection bits. It will back up fine, but when it comes to restoring, it will bomb out. (I get to test these things because I have a SyQuest removable-cartridge drive.) Specifically, if you set something to be write-proof and then back it up, upon restore, Double-Back will complain that the file is not writable. It took me hours to go through all the floppies by hand and clear (set?) the bits back to where they belong. (The restore was needed because another of their programs, Tune-Up, totally munged my disk because I had the wrong number of blocks reserved at the front. Did it TELL me there was a problem? Noooooo. <fume>). In general, I find this package to be totally unprofessional and much more like a hack than many PD programs I've used. The backup works but can't be restored. There is no sanity checking even on destructive operations. Most of the options documented are not available. The ReadMe file simply says "some of the options are not available" and does not tell you which ones. (C'mon people! This is DiskMechanic 2.5 already!) Running out of memory tells you that the disk block is bad even if you are out of memory because the cache the program maintains is too large (took me a while to figure that one out). Clicking on the "help" gadget brings up a series of blank requesters (3 or 4, if I remember) where help would be had LFL finished the programs before releasing them. I've received no update information and no answers from my letter. I will admit that if you do everything right, Workshop and TuneUp seem to work most of the time. However, I would not recommend these programs to anybody who is looking for programs to do what these do. I finally got disgusted and wrote my own, as usual. <grr> -- Darren