Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!mcsun!hp4nl!ruuinf!prisma!fred
From: fred@prisma.cv.ruu.nl (Fred Appelman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: BackupST limitations?
Message-ID: <fred.664031265@prisma>
Date: 16 Jan 91 13:07:45 GMT
References: <1991Jan12.172310.25325@rodan.acs.syr.edu> <59439@aurs01.UUCP>
Organization: University of Utrecht, 3D Computer Vision, The Netherlands
Lines: 41

In <59439@aurs01.UUCP> roberson@aurs01.UUCP (Charles "Chip" Roberson) writes:

>In article <1991Jan12.172310.25325@rodan.acs.syr.edu> dinapoli@rodan.acs.syr.edu (Ron DiNapoli) writes:
>>There's been some talk about BackupST over the past month or so, so I 
>>decided to try it out.   Nice program!  However I've had a problem with
>>trying to backup my "fonts" directory for TeX.  There are a lot of files
>>in this one directory (and lots of subdirectories as I'm sure users of 
>>TeX know very well) and after scanning through the majority of them 
>>(calculating sizes) it doesn't seem to be able to open any more files.
>
>>Anyone else have a problem like this?  I also tried
>>to zoo the whole directory and it had problems too!
>
>Yep!  Me too...but with Turtle.  Turtle can't handle my d:\tex\fonts
>directory. 

BackupST is a *very* clean program. Except for reading/writing to floppy/screen
I use high level gemdos calls to do the job. This means that if GEMDOS has
the problem, BackupST will have the trouble too. I am not sure if the problems
described above, are GEMDOS errors, but because Turtle and zoo have the 
same problems, I think that it is indead a GEMDOS error. Is there anybody
on the net who can confirm the existence of such error. Is it fixed in 
newer versions of the TOS (1.4 or 3.0)? 

As far as I know right now, there is one bug clear bug in the program:
	The program assumes that it needs 32K of memory for the screen
	which can be reached by pressing the 'esc' key. This is not true
	for 'TT' machines, and for Mega ST machines with larger screens.

I am currently working on a new version of the software which will be
completely under GEM. This new version will fix the memory allocation
error. 

BackupST will become slow if directorys with hundreds of files are backup'ed. 
BackupST is slow because Fsfirst() and Fsnext() are slow. Is there anybode
who knows how to make this faster in a *portable* way?

If you have wishes for the new version of BackupST please mail them to
me. 

Fred