Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ncar!noao!asuvax!nud!fishpond!fnf
From: fnf@fishpond.UUCP (Fred Fish)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: HD backup programs (was Re: Lazy rats)
Message-ID: <137@fishpond.UUCP>
Date: 11 Nov 88 00:25:08 GMT
References: <91@censor.UUCP> <1066@esunix.UUCP>
Reply-To: fnf@fishpond.UUCP (Fred Fish)
Organization: occasionally
Lines: 65

In article <1066@esunix.UUCP> blgardne@esunix.UUCP (Blaine Gardner) writes:
>What's the status on Fred Fish's BRU program? I seem to remember that
>he was  going commercial with it, but haven't heard anything lately.

After over a year in beta test, with maybe one or two bugs reported, I guess
it's about time to shoot the programmer and ship it...  :-)

Actually, here is the progress since the last beta, some months ago:

1.	I now have a nice manual, about 100 pages or so, written
	mostly by Rob Peck with some polishing by moi.  It is
	primarily for the Unix version, but still quite useful
	for Amiga users.  Some more work probably needs to go
	into it for the Amiga specific features.  All current beta
	testers will be getting a new release, along with this 
	current manual, within a week or two.

2.	Someone has been contracted with to do the Intuition front
	end, and this work is expected to be completed within about
	a month or two.  Current thinking is that BRU will acquire
	an AREXX port, and the front end will communicate with BRU
	through this port.

3.	I would really like to get BRU talking to a tape drive before
	calling it "done".  Floppies are OK for backing up small hard
	drives (say 40Mb or less), but many people have MUCH larger
	drives online (500-1000Mb).  BRU really thrives in this 
	environment (lots of disk space and fast, high capacity
	backup media).  This is mostly waiting on OS support, though
	I have done some work inside BRU in preparation for tape
	support.

It may be shipping soon in it's current state, bundled with someone's
hardware and software.  I'll leave it to them to let the cat out of the
bag if they so desire...

>BRU was supposed to be able to recover anything short of taking scissors
>to a floppy (it seems Fred mentioned sticking pins in a disk was a fair
>test :-). How does BRU rate on backup speed, compression, and other
>features?

In theory, given the format of the archive and the information stored
in each block, you could take a tape containing a BRU archive, carefully
cut it up into little pieces at the block boundries, toss all the
pieces into a hat and stir, dump them out, tape them back together again,
and still be able to recover all of the information.  I didn't figure that
writing the code to actually deal with this situation was worth the
effort though, but I could probably do it in less than a week.  :-)

Backup speed on AmigaDOS relative to other backup programs is probably
about average.  I would expect it to be faster than programs that write
to floppies in AmigaDOS format.  On Unix, the double buffering mode has
frequently given throughput 5 or 6 times greater than tar or cpio, for
example.  I just tested it on a Sun-4 today for the first time (compiled
and ran with no changes) and it was able to keep the cartridge drive
streaming from start to finish, with about 5Mb/min throughput.  An
Amiga version with double buffering is a possible future enhancement.

Compression generally reduces archive size by 30-50 percent, and
typically doubles or triples execution time.

-Fred
-- 
# Fred Fish, 1346 West 10th Place, Tempe, AZ 85281,  USA
# noao!nud!fishpond!fnf                   (602) 921-1113