bane@mimsy.umd.edu (John R. Bane) (02/13/90)
Does there exist, PD/shareware/commercial software for the ST that can do a RAM image dump at intervals to help you recover from crashes? The phantom typist bit my wife again twice today; the first time she was able to mouse Save and reboot with no damage done -- the second time she lost an hour's work and her temper. HELP! -- ARPAnet: bane@mimsy.umd.edu UUCP:...umcp-cs!bane
jburka@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (Jeffrey C. Burka) (02/14/90)
Gee. Sounds like one of the best reasons I've yet heard to buy WordPerfect, which has an auto-backup feature (I've never lost more than 8 minutes of work, and with my hard drive, I don't notice the autosaving at all). Come to think of it, I've only seen the phantom typist twice the school year. It's shown up much less frequently in the last 8 months or so...the only thing I can think of that's different in my system is that I'm using TurboST Jeff
hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu) (02/14/90)
In article <22492@mimsy.umd.edu> bane@mimsy.umd.edu (John R. Bane) writes: >Does there exist, PD/shareware/commercial software for the ST that can do >a RAM image dump at intervals to help you recover from crashes? The >phantom typist bit my wife again twice today; the first time she was >able to mouse Save and reboot with no damage done -- the second time >she lost an hour's work and her temper. Switchback can sort of do what you want. You can use it to partition your ST memory into chunks of 512K, 1meg, or 2meg (don't remember if there were other supported sizes) and run different programs in each partition, or take snapshots of the current partition and save them in other partitions. Then you run their buffer utility to save a partition to disk. The switchback software could probably be altered to not use partitions, and just dump and restore all of memory as a single block, but it would need about 4K for control info. (That's how much it eats out of each of the partitions it sets up.) (I just bought one of these a couple weeks ago; I like it a lot. Really slick. Of course, I use it with a Mega-4, with more RAM in an UltraDisk, so I can really put this thing thru its paces...) It's unfortunate that Alpha Systems no longer makes their UltraDisks - 4meg of memory there is quite the handy thing to have. I can run Minix in 4 meg and TOS in another 4 meg, and swap between the two at the touch of a button. Also, since the UltraDisk is battery backed up, if your machine locks up, as long as you had a copy of the current image stored there, you can just toggle the power and swap it back in and keep right on running. This is one of the most awesome hardware/software combos I've seen for the ST; I'm kind of surprised more people aren't using it. I don't have their number handy right now, but you should be able to look 'em up in most ST magazines. I ordered Switchback straight from them and got it via UPS in 3 days. It works really well, I like it a lot... (No affiliation, just a satisfied customer...) -- -- Howard Chu @ University of Michigan