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From: sbanner1@uvicctr.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Comments on FASTBACK disk backup utility?
Message-ID: <228@uvicctr.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 16-Feb-87 02:22:29 EST
Article-I.D.: uvicctr.228
Posted: Mon Feb 16 02:22:29 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 17-Feb-87 18:41:21 EST
References: <4394@curly.ucla-cs.UCLA.EDU>
Reply-To: sbanner1@uvicctr.UUCP (S. John Banner)
Organization: University of Victoria, Victoria B.C. Canada
Lines: 42

In article <4394@curly.ucla-cs.UCLA.EDU> wales@LOCUS.UCLA.EDU (Rich Wales) writes:
>I am considering buying the FASTBACK hard-disk backup program.
>
>FASTBACK is supposedly very fast, and (because of an "Advanced Error
>Correction" scheme) very reliable.  (At least, that's what the company's
>own advertising says. :-})

   Hello,  I have been using Fastback for the past few months, and I
am MOST happy with it.  I can backup my 20Meg HardDisk onto standard
360K floppies in from 15-35 minutes (depending on disk fragmentation,
and whether I have the disk cache program running [I know a disk cache
shouldn't affect this sort of an application, but it DOES]).  On average,
it takes me about 25 minutes to backup 20Meg of files, and if you forget
to swap disks, it tells you (instead of just overwriteing the disk, and
messing up your backup; a feature I have been MOST thankful of more than
once [30 secs to switch a disk is not much if you are trying to talk to
someone else at the same time]).  The program also produces a compleate
list of all the files you have backed up, with what disk they are on,
which is also a nice feature.  The one thing (though it is not too big
a deal, as it doesn't come up that often), is that it takes much longer
to restore files as it does to back them up (it took about 1.5-2 hours
[it was 2AM, so it is hard to remember... :-) ], to restore the full
20Meg of files...  As I say this is not a big deal, as you don't go
around restoring your entire hard-drive every second week (I have only
done it once :-).

   I can't really comment on other backup utilities, as the only one I
have ever used, other than Fastback is the Dos utility, and my power
supply died halfway through the only backup I started with it (Sort of
a good thing I think, I think it would have taken about 6hours if it
hadn't died; or at least it seemed that way at the time...  :-).

                      S. John Banner

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