Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bu-cs!madd
From: madd@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Jim Frost)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Backup incompatabilities between MS-DOS 3.2 AND MS-DOS 3.3
Message-ID: <19756@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: 7 Feb 88 20:23:17 GMT
References: <102@tron.UUCP>
Reply-To: madd@bu-it.bu.edu (Jim Frost)
Followup-To: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Organization: Boston University Distributed Systems Group
Lines: 30

In article <102@tron.UUCP> celozzi@tron.UUCP (Dominic J Celozzi) writes:
>Someone I work with was complaining that Back-ups using MS-DOS 3.2 are not
>compatable with those using MS-DOS 3.3?  That is, if someone updated to
>MS-DOS 3.3, then all the backups done under the old version would be
>worthless!  Is this actually true??  I asked him again to ensure I wasn't
>misinterpretting what was being said.  If anyone has similar experience or
>knows this to be false, please respond.  Also, if this is true and anyone
>knows of a patch for it ... by all means respond!!

This is not only true between DOS's 3.2 and 3.3, but between all
version of MS-DOS BACKUP/RESTORE.

How to overcome this problem:

You'd think that you could just use the RESTORE from the machine that
you did the BACKUP on, but this won't usually work.  The silly
software verifies the DOS version and won't run, even though the DOS
version is irrelevant.

The easy way:  boot the DOS version that the BACKUP was done under
from floppy and use that DOS's RESTORE.

The best way:  throw away the MS-DOS BACKUP/RESTORE and buy a new
utility.  The MS-DOS backup utilities are disgraceful.  They are slow,
cumbersome, non-portable, and unreliable.  There are a lot of PD and
commercial backup programs out there.  Of all of them I've seen, none
are as bad as those provided with MS-DOS.

jim frost
madd@bu-it.bu.edu