Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!decwrl!bacchus.pa.dec.com!granite.pa.dec.com!mwm From: mwm@raven.pa.dec.com (Mike (My Watch Has Windows) Meyer) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Hard Drive Backup Utils Message-ID: Date: 8 Oct 90 18:31:49 GMT References: <1990Oct6.210843.8398@athena.mit.edu> Sender: news@wrl.dec.com (News) Organization: Missionaria Phonibalonica Lines: 45 In-Reply-To: rlcarr@athena.mit.edu's message of 6 Oct 90 21:08:43 GMT In article <1990Oct6.210843.8398@athena.mit.edu> rlcarr@athena.mit.edu (Richard L. Carreiro) writes: It's now time for me to get a hard drive backup program. Sooo, what should I get? Quarterback seems to have all the ads. Is it any good? What are it's advantages, disadvantages, problems? QuarterBack doesn't seem to have any real competition. Everyone I know who services the beasts claim it's the only thing to buy; there are stores that _won't_ sell anything else, and stores where the answer to the question "I want a backup program" is "I'll get quarterback. It's fast, stable, and supported. What else is out there? There are a variety of hard disk backup systems on the Fish disks. I've written a couple myself, but have dropped them all in favor of ExpressCopy. MrBackup seems to be popular as a shareware package. The reason I don't use any of the PD backup utilities is speed - they just take to long. Backing up a 100Meg hard disk with one of them is an all-weekend proposition. It's more like an evening with ExpressCopy. If you want to roll your own, I recommend finding a copy of treewalk, and using it's Rexx interface to prototype your system (that's how I did mine). Note that floppy disk IO seems to be the overriding factor. Whatever I get, it has to be able to back up to floppy, and it'd be nice if it could back up to SCSI tape or other things of that sort (in th even I ever bvuy such a thing...) Many of the redistributable do that. QuarterBack does. ExpressCopy doesn't. My problem with quarterback is that it writes quarterback format floppies. ExpressCopy is slightly slower, but otherwise similar (from what I've heard), and creates AmigaDOS format floppies (either OFS or FFS). ExpressCopy is also hard to find. I've been through one disk crash with it, and was quite satisified with the results (though I'm going to have to reorganize my backup scheme).