[comp.sys.mac.apps] HD Backup

horowitz@casbah.acns.nwu.edu (Frank Horowitz) (03/22/91)

A professor in my department has been using HD Backup (v. 1.1) to backup
his (Apple supplied) internal 40 meg hard drive.  The drive recently
crapped out, and he ultimately reformatted it and then attempted to restore
his backup.  

HD Backup has two restoration options: single file, and whole backup set.
Since he has the whole set, he tried that option.  The first few floppies
restore correctly.  Then, after restoring many of the files on the fourth
floppy, HD Backup complains about an unreadable file.  There's a "continue"
button in the dialog box that purports to skip the bad file and attempt to
continue with the restore.  In this case, it doesn't succeed (the dialog is
repeated many dozens(?) of times reporting the damaged filename as ""; then
the command terminates as if the entire restore had completed
successfully).  

The other restoration option, single file restoration, does just that: one
file at a time is restored, with a separate StdFileDialog presented for
each one---about twenty seconds per file.  While possible in principal, it
does *NOT* restore the directory structure (i.e. files are all placed in
the root directory); and in any case we're talking about 40 more floppies
or so, each with tens of files.

Apple telephone customer service has been singularly unhelpful in solving
this problem (they wanted him to buy a tape drive and use some new
tape-backup software they're apparently shipping these days---for the
*next* time this happens).  I'd like to emphasize that this is a 100% Apple
setup here; MacII, Apple internal HD, Apple supplied "backup" software.

Clearly the old directory information is still on the floppies
(somewhere/somehow).  If only one could do a "partial" restore starting from
some disk other than the first; if only, if only... :-(   Has anyone ever
coerced HD Backup around this kind of problem.  Does any other backup
program know how to read the directory information contained in HD Backup
floppies?  Even some way of obtaining a fully qualified pathname listing
for each file would be helpful. 

Obvously, I intend to twist the Professor's arm to force him to buy some
decent backup software once this is over.

	Thanks for any help you can give us,
		Frank Horowitz

NU163467@NDSUVM1.BITNET (Marshall Carroll) (03/26/91)

Hi. I'd like to backup my hard drive onto floppies such that the
directory structure is preserved. Is HFS backup adequate? What
does HFS stand for? Who makes it? Is it compatible with System
6.0.7 on a IIsi? Thanks for your help, Marsh
Internet: NU163467@VM1.NODAK.EDU
BITNET:   NU163467@NDSUVM1