Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!wjh12!lotto
From: lotto@wjh12.harvard.edu (Jerry Lotto)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Backup incompatabilities between MS-DOS 3.2 AND MS-DOS 3.3
Message-ID: <141@wjh12.harvard.edu>
Date: 7 Feb 88 21:24:00 GMT
References: <102@tron.UUCP> <19756@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Reply-To: lotto@wjh12.UUCP (Jerry Lotto)
Organization: Harvard Univ. Chem. Dept.
Lines: 47

In article <19756@bu-cs.BU.EDU> madd@bu-it.bu.edu (Jim Frost) writes:
>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

>utility.  The MS-DOS backup utilities are disgraceful.  They are slow,
>cumbersome, non-portable, and unreliable.  There are a lot of PD and

No kidding! I just used DOS 3.3 backup for the first time. It got
about 75% of the way along my hard disk and (1.5 hours later) aborted
w/ "Insufficient memory". I had a rather large TSR, and (knowing
better) removed it and ran backup again. Same problem, same place.
Then I try spanning just the failed directory -> bomb.

It apparently cannot deal with the directory hierarchy (not a
particularly bad one, it dies at a directory \usr\help that contains
128 entries: 1 file of 0 length, . and .. and 125 directories.) Trying
to backup d:\usr\help\*.* a: /s just returns w/o selecting anything,
even though there are a couple of files in each of the 125
directories.

strike match...

What an incredible botch job! IBM is bragging that as of DOS 3.2 they
wrote this thing!

blow it out.

Anyway, enough flame. I want to reverse engineer the dos backup and
restore programs. The PD stuff out there is good, but I want to be
able to make backups that can be read from a vanilla DOS distribution.
Before I embark on this trip, does anyone already know the format of
the 3.3 backup and restore files? Has anyone tried this yet? Are there
any (valid) copyright protections on the format of backup files?

E-mail responses to me directly, please.

Disclaimer: Any resemblance between the opinions (expressed herein) and
those of any individual or organization, real or imagined, is totally
coincidental. Nobody is responsible for this note. IBM is a registered
trademark of International Business Machines Corp. "\" probably is too.


-- 
Gerald Lotto - Harvard Chemistry Dept.
UUCP:  {seismo,harpo,ihnp4,linus,allegra,ut-sally}!harvard!lotto
ARPA:  lotto@harvard.harvard.edu