rasnow@bek-mc.caltech.edu (Brian Rasnow) (01/15/88)
I just bought Fastback 1.0 at the local store hoping to save time backing up 40+Mb. The program is intuitive and fast, in part because it takes uninitialized disks - but beware! At disk 33, it reported a write verify failure, and handles this error by forgetting where or what it was doing - ie. start over. (FLAME ON) The company clearly decided to market this product knowing it was incomplete and would waste lots of time of the unsuspecting users. Numerous phone calls to tech support only got me busy signals. When I called the sales line instead, the sales manager felt this was not a significant problem with the program, though it has been "corrected" in a 1.02. Beware - their "insignificant" problem can cost users lots of wasted time. Because of their attitude that wasting end users time is insignificant, I urge a boycot of this product and others marketed by Fifth Generation Systems. (FLAME OFF) Does anyone have a good suggestion for a hard disk program? Thanks in advance. Brian Rasnow rasnow@bek-mc.caltech.edu
jwhitnel@csi.UUCP (01/15/88)
In article <5171@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> rasnow@bek-mc.caltech.edu (Brian Rasnow) writes: >I just bought Fastback 1.0 at the local store hoping to save time >backing up 40+Mb. The program is intuitive and fast, in part >because it takes uninitialized disks - but beware! At disk 33, it >reported a write verify failure, and handles this error by >forgetting where or what it was doing - ie. start over. Thanks for the report, I hate buggy backup programs. > >Does anyone have a good suggestion for a hard disk program? Get a copy of DiskFit (by SuperMac). The latest version is 1.4 (1.3 if you have a DataFrame). It comes in two versions, one for DataFrames only (free from SuperMac) and one for generic hard disks (about $75). It is basicly a very fancy and fast disk-to-disk copy program. It is best used for maintaining an image of your hard disk, since rather then building a growing archive it reuses space taken up by older versions of a file. In other words, if you change a file it will delete the old copy and put the new copy on the backup. The file filters are limited, you can choose backup the whole disk, applications/system files only, data files only or backup a single file. It is very fast, limited only by the speed of the floppies. Restore is equally limited, restore a complete disk or retrieve individual files. Files are not stored in any special way so the finder can be used to look at your backup disks. It will auto-format disks for you. It's best features are it's ease of use, it's speed and it's error recovery. If you loose one of the disks of a backup, you can still get to the rest. >Thanks in advance. > >Brian Rasnow >rasnow@bek-mc.caltech.edu Jerry Whitnell Lizzi Borden took an axe Communication Solutions, Inc. And plunged it deep into the VAX; Don't you envy people who Do all the things You want to do?
stephens@hpcupt1.HP.COM (Greg Stephens) (01/15/88)
The problem you described is a known problem with FastBack 1.0 and has been corrected in 1.02. I have seen the problem described in several magazines, including MacWeek, and am suprised the sales rep. wasn't aware of it. Anyway, I bought FastBack in November and received a copy of the 1.02 version within a few weeks after I sent in my registration card. Overall, I like the program. I am not too crazy about the fact that each backup I make requires a catalog disk.
sbb@esquire.UUCP (Stephen B. Baumgarten) (01/16/88)
In article <5171@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> rasnow@bek-mc.caltech.edu (Brian Rasnow) writes: >I just bought Fastback 1.0 at the local store hoping to save time >backing up 40+Mb. The program is intuitive and fast, in part >because it takes uninitialized disks - but beware! At disk 33, it >reported a write verify failure, and handles this error by >forgetting where or what it was doing - ie. start over. >[ ... ] >Does anyone have a good suggestion for a hard disk program? >Thanks in advance. As always, we dedicated DiskFit owners suggest... DiskFit! It's the best, and if you back up frequently, probably faster than programs like FastBack that do weird things with your drives and write non-standard files. Also, great tech support (I say this for SuperMac in general -- I've never had a problem with DiskFit). Give it a try. -- Steve Baumgarten | "New York... when civilization falls apart, Davis Polk & Wardwell | remember, we were way ahead of you." ...!cmcl2!esquire!sbb | - David Letterman
gnome@oliveb.olivetti.com (Gary) (01/16/88)
> (FLAME ON) > The company clearly decided to market this product knowing > it was incomplete and would waste lots of time of the unsuspecting > users. Numerous phone calls to tech support only got me busy signals. I had the misfortune of using this crappy program on an ATT 6300. The "writers" of this program decided that they would assume that the disk-drives MUST spin while the door is open. If not, the program's first write is done before the drive has spun-up. And, being the software whiz-kids that they are, they never bother to do a retry. In other words, their program just won't work on some machines. I called them and they said, "Oh well. Sorry."
clive@drutx.ATT.COM (Clive Steward) (01/17/88)
in article <283@esquire.UUCP>, sbb@esquire.UUCP (Stephen B. Baumgarten) says: > In article <5171@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> rasnow@bek-mc.caltech.edu (Brian Rasnow) writes: >>I just bought Fastback 1.0... >>Does anyone have a good suggestion for a hard disk program? >>Thanks in advance. > > As always, we dedicated DiskFit owners suggest... DiskFit! I'd like to second the motion, with comment. I'd been using PCPC's fine and elegant HFS Backup (2.02) for months, and it does a great job, by taking lots of extra disks, though I think not much if any extra time. I do still keep it around for odd things like the moment's task -- I'm trying to keep a full save of 50 disks around clean, while additionally backing up just the delta past a certain day on a few disks. Here I can use the time gating of HFS Backup, which DiskFit lacks, being oriented around use-it-every-day full image tracking. (Why I want to do this? See below, if interested.) Any other time, DiskFit really shines. In spite of the rude note in their on-line help, telling you to do it their way, not piecemeal. I really do use it every day, sometimes more than once, because it's so efficient about taking just what it needs to, preserving disk space. It's everything they say it is, this way. And it's also elegant, so far as it goes. I don't know that it's at all quicker, but it is more manageable. Having both, I wish for features of both, of course. It seems date/time gating, and at least folder if not file-by-file gating would be completely appropriate as an upgrade to DiskFit. As important, would be the ability to select and specify when doing a restore. The present situation is restore all, or by hand from the file copies (few are split apart; these are joinable) on the backup disks themselves. See below. Or maybe we should just be glad to pay each developer the fairly nominal price for a job well done in each case. Now that's share-ware! Clive P.S. For those who want to know the awful. If you've been following the saga of the Clean Operation With Multifinder, we last left Bucky staring at his melting Mac, saying, "You've been holding out on me -- you had a thermal problem as well as one with allocation." In the process, and because of some other indications, I decided with PCPC technical support to do a reformat of the disk. They gave me the secret code, I ran the formatter, and rewrote the driver. Only to find that the formatter I had was Old Stuff, and for the 20 mb hard drive, not my 45. At least it runs, though it thinks it's 20 mb. I had a 7-person department to design by today, and so reloaded what I needed onto the mini-fied drive. Which is also tedious, with DiskFit, as there's no way to say what you do and don't want -- just run til the disk is full, then the program complains, and you can make space, and start where you left off. This is ok, but after you clear folders away, it complains and searches in a timeconsuming way for each place it can't find, which makes the process very slow. Instead of half an hour, 3 hours to reload a 20 mb partition. This is why Disk Fit needs file filtering. I might be loading onto a standby, smaller hard-drive, in a pinch, and so might you. Anyway, for the moment I do mini-backups from that date, using the file filtering in PCPC HFS Backup. The right formatter/driver installer was supposed to be FedExpressed to get here Friday, you can guess that it didn't. Why to have backups, and getarounds.
fjo@ttrdf.UUCP (Frank Owen ) (01/19/88)
in article <5171@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>, rasnow@bek-mc.caltech.edu (Brian Rasnow) says: > > I just bought Fastback 1.0 at the local store hoping to save time > ... > I urge a boycot of this product > and others marketed by Fifth Generation Systems. > (FLAME OFF) > > Does anyone have a good suggestion for a hard disk program? > Thanks in advance. We have the backup utility that came with our DataFrame hard disk drive. It is called "DiskFit" and is a fantastic product. It works by creating a "smart set" of backup diskettes. This contains an up-to-the minute image of your hard disk, as daily backups directly manipulate only those portions of the "smart-set" that have been changed since your last backup. There is no need for "incremental" backups disks. The daily(weekly or whatever) backup operation normally only takes a few minutes. The version that we have only works on the DataFrame, but SuperMac (the makers of the DataFrame) markets a version that works on any generic disk drive. I think it costs around $50. Frank Owen AT&T Data Systems Division Skokie,Il ..ihnp4!ttrdf!fjo -- Frank Owen (fjo@ttrde) 312-982-2182 AT&T Information Systems Computer Systems Division, 5555 Touhy Ave., Skokie, IL 60077 PATH: ...!ihnp4!ttrde!fjo
dwb@apple.UUCP (David W. Berry) (01/21/88)
In article <321@ttrdf.UUCP> fjo@ttrdf.UUCP (Frank Owen ) writes: >in article <5171@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>, rasnow@bek-mc.caltech.edu (Brian Rasnow) says: >We have the backup utility that came with our DataFrame hard disk >drive. It is called "DiskFit" and is a fantastic product. >It works by creating a "smart set" of backup diskettes. This >contains an up-to-the minute image of your hard disk, as daily >backups directly manipulate only those portions of the "smart-set" >that have been changed since your last backup. There is no need >for "incremental" backups disks. The daily(weekly or whatever) backup >operation normally only takes a few minutes. "no need for incremental backup disks" is a feature? :-) Actually, this is one of my complaints about DiskFit. If I do backups every day I can't have two overlapping sets of backups which enable to restore files as they were day before yesterday, just to the way they were yesterday. DiskFit is fine if the reason you do backups is to protect against your hardware going south. It's less than optimal if you are using it as an archival system instead. DiskFit also only works to media that can be "mounted" on the desktop, thus it can be used with Apple's tape drive, but can't be used with tape drives using the TEAC drive. Unfortunately, that's what most of the available 20 Meg drives use, including the MDIdeas drive that I've got. If you do backups to floppies in case your system (not your fingers :-) goes haywire, by all means get DiskFit. -- David W. Berry dwb@well.uucp dwb@Delphi dwb@apple.com 973-5168@408.MaBell Disclaimer: Apple doesn't even know I have an opinion and certainly wouldn't want if they did.
jwhitnel@csi.UUCP (Jerry Whitnell) (01/22/88)
In article <7231@apple.UUCP> dwb@apple.UUCP (David W. Berry) writes: >In article <321@ttrdf.UUCP> fjo@ttrdf.UUCP (Frank Owen ) writes: >>in article <5171@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>, rasnow@bek-mc.caltech.edu (Brian Rasnow) says: >Actually, this is one of my complaints about DiskFit. If I do backups >every day I can't have two overlapping sets of backups which enable to >restore files as they were day before yesterday, just to the way they >were yesterday. Huh? Gee, that's what I thought I was doing! You can have multiple Smart Sets that represent backups at different points. I have three right now, my current backup (data only), the previous backup (data only) and an applications only backup. I alternate between data smart sets so that if I loose one, I can always go to the other. > David W. Berry Jerry Whitnell Lizzi Borden took an axe Communication Solutions, Inc. And plunged it deep into the VAX; Don't you envy people who Do all the things You want to do?