Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!husc6!linus!raybed2!rayssd!galaxia!amanpt1!mrr
From: mrr@amanpt1.zone1.com (Mark Rinfret)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Backup Programs
Summary: You're close enough...
Message-ID: <469@amanpt1.zone1.com>
Date: 25 May 88 14:16:14 GMT
References: <2890@polya.Stanford.EDU> <7207@swan.ulowell.edu> <2902@polya.Stanford.EDU>
Organization: Aquidneck Management Associates
Lines: 53

In article <2902@polya.Stanford.EDU>, rokicki@polya.Stanford.EDU (Tomas G. Rokicki) writes:
> > >... I've looked at MRBackup ... which I dismissed almost immediately.
> > 
> > You must have dismissed MRBackup for some other reason, since it will
> > do this .. it looks for a particular label on any inserted disk & uses
> > that.  It means you have to pre-label all your disks, though.
> 
> Did I screw this up?  I don't think MRBackup was the one I dismissed.
> The thing I didn't like about it was that it required preformatted
> disks, and wasn't particularly fast.  Sure, it prompts if you want to
> format the disk, but I want it to assume none of my disks are formatted.
> 
> Please, correct me if I'm wrong . . . 

You're probably right enough in that MRBackup doesn't do what you want it
to do, Tom.  MRBackup will do one of two things:

- Format each disk, as it goes, if you turn on the format option.  In this
  case, MRBackup will prompt you for an acknowledgement (or cancellation)
  that a new disk has been inserted for formatting.  It will manufacture a
  name using the word "Backup" and the current date (I know, this could be
  a lot more flexible).

- Use preformatted disks.  These may have been previously formatted by MRBackup
  (my original intent was to allow "freshening" of backup disks) or you may
  have simply formatted them with the Format program.  In this case, MRBackup
  again prompts for an acknowledgement that the disk is inserted.  It then
  reads the disk volume info to obtain the disk name and proceeds as before.

It probably wouldn't be a big deal to allow a <drive range> or <drive set>
specification, along with an option to disable (or at least modify) the
prompting mechanisms.  However, I'm not going to make any promises.  I also
like the CLI invocation capabilities of SDBackup, Bru, etc., but it's unlikely
that I'll try to do the same.  I'm currently considering a rewrite which does
not use AmigaDOS structure on the backup media, to gain speed.  I'll confess
that I don't do backups anywhere near as often as I should, simply because it
takes so darned long (I've actually done backups that spanned 3 days, simply
because I couldn't be there long enough to get it done in one session - the
perils of family life :-).  My first priority, then, is to make MRBackup faster.
If I can, I'll address the multi-drive issue, but you probably still won't
like MRBackup.  Sorry, and good luck in your search.

> 
> -tom
> -- 

Mark

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