blgardne@esunix.UUCP (Blaine Gardner) (11/08/88)
From article <91@censor.UUCP>, by hugh@censor.UUCP (Hugh Gamble): > > I'm in need of a good backup utility to make it as little pain as possible > to back up 80M to a single floppy drive. I used an old version of MR Backup > once, but mostly I've been feeling lucky & not doing backups :^( Now that Matt has restore working, I'm pretty happy with his backup/restore program that was posted to moderated groups a couple of days ago. Matt suggests that you run the backup to another partition on your hard drive, then copy the (~800K) backup files to floppies. This makes the backup go pretty quick, even with compression turned on. As mentioned in the docs, limitations are files greater than the size of a floppy, and damaged backup files can't be recovered. What's the status on Fred Fish's BRU program? I seem to remember that he was going commercial with it, but haven't heard anything lately. BRU was supposed to be able to recover anything short of taking scissors to a floppy (it seems Fred mentioned sticking pins in a disk was a fair test :-). How does BRU rate on backup speed, compression, and other features? -- Blaine Gardner @ Evans & Sutherland 580 Arapeen Drive, SLC, Utah 84108 Here: utah-cs!esunix!blgardne {ucbvax,allegra,decvax}!decwrl!esunix!blgardne There: uunet!iconsys!caeco!pedro!worsel!blaine (under construction) "Nobody will ever need more than 64K." "Nobody needs multitasking on a PC."
fnf@fishpond.UUCP (Fred Fish) (11/11/88)
In article <1066@esunix.UUCP> blgardne@esunix.UUCP (Blaine Gardner) writes: >What's the status on Fred Fish's BRU program? I seem to remember that >he was going commercial with it, but haven't heard anything lately. After over a year in beta test, with maybe one or two bugs reported, I guess it's about time to shoot the programmer and ship it... :-) Actually, here is the progress since the last beta, some months ago: 1. I now have a nice manual, about 100 pages or so, written mostly by Rob Peck with some polishing by moi. It is primarily for the Unix version, but still quite useful for Amiga users. Some more work probably needs to go into it for the Amiga specific features. All current beta testers will be getting a new release, along with this current manual, within a week or two. 2. Someone has been contracted with to do the Intuition front end, and this work is expected to be completed within about a month or two. Current thinking is that BRU will acquire an AREXX port, and the front end will communicate with BRU through this port. 3. I would really like to get BRU talking to a tape drive before calling it "done". Floppies are OK for backing up small hard drives (say 40Mb or less), but many people have MUCH larger drives online (500-1000Mb). BRU really thrives in this environment (lots of disk space and fast, high capacity backup media). This is mostly waiting on OS support, though I have done some work inside BRU in preparation for tape support. It may be shipping soon in it's current state, bundled with someone's hardware and software. I'll leave it to them to let the cat out of the bag if they so desire... >BRU was supposed to be able to recover anything short of taking scissors >to a floppy (it seems Fred mentioned sticking pins in a disk was a fair >test :-). How does BRU rate on backup speed, compression, and other >features? In theory, given the format of the archive and the information stored in each block, you could take a tape containing a BRU archive, carefully cut it up into little pieces at the block boundries, toss all the pieces into a hat and stir, dump them out, tape them back together again, and still be able to recover all of the information. I didn't figure that writing the code to actually deal with this situation was worth the effort though, but I could probably do it in less than a week. :-) Backup speed on AmigaDOS relative to other backup programs is probably about average. I would expect it to be faster than programs that write to floppies in AmigaDOS format. On Unix, the double buffering mode has frequently given throughput 5 or 6 times greater than tar or cpio, for example. I just tested it on a Sun-4 today for the first time (compiled and ran with no changes) and it was able to keep the cartridge drive streaming from start to finish, with about 5Mb/min throughput. An Amiga version with double buffering is a possible future enhancement. Compression generally reduces archive size by 30-50 percent, and typically doubles or triples execution time. -Fred -- # Fred Fish, 1346 West 10th Place, Tempe, AZ 85281, USA # noao!nud!fishpond!fnf (602) 921-1113
joseph@garfield.MUN.EDU (Joseph Dawson) (04/09/89)
I am looking for a backup program that will erase files off my backup disks when I erase them off my hard disk. That way I will only need 40 MEGS of disks to backup a 40 meg hard disk. Such a program is quite common on other systems (IBM & MAC), but I can't find one for the Amiga. Please help, Joseph@garfield.UUCP
kevin@cbmvax.UUCP (Kevin Klop) (04/10/89)
In article <5169@garfield.MUN.EDU> joseph@garfield.MUN.EDU (Joseph Dawson) writes: > >I am looking for a backup program that will erase files off my >backup disks when I erase them off my hard disk. That way I will >only need 40 MEGS of disks to backup a 40 meg hard disk. > >Such a program is quite common on other systems (IBM & MAC), but >I can't find one for the Amiga. Common?? I don't think so, as none of the backup programs that I have seen on either machine (and I have done a lot of work with both of them) erased files off of my backups when I delete them from the hard drive. In fact, I would immediately trash any backup program that DID do that. Why? Because one of the most frequent mistakes is the "oops, I deleted the wrong thing last week - I'd better recover it from the backup." type. Except that your method wouldn't allow that to happen. -- Kevin --