Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!rutgers!mtune!mtgzz!drutx!clive
From: clive@drutx.ATT.COM (Clive Steward)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Fastback --- GARBAGE ALERT
Message-ID: <6474@drutx.ATT.COM>
Date: 17 Jan 88 04:06:14 GMT
References: <283@esquire.UUCP>
Organization: resident visitor
Lines: 77

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.