Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!venera.isi.edu!schur
From: schur@venera.isi.edu (Sean Schur)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Can I Protect My Hard Drive From Myself?
Message-ID: <11117@venera.isi.edu>
Date: 24 Dec 89 19:35:22 GMT
Reply-To: schur@venera.isi.edu (Sean Schur)
Organization: USC-Information Sciences Institute
Lines: 37

Recently I made a major mistake and killed my entire hard disk. I want to
protect myself from making the same and similar errors in the future and I
hope someone can help me.

Basically, I was trying to backup my hard disk using MRBackup. I have 4 
partitions on my hard disk and had completed backup on one partition and
was moving to the second. Unfortunately, instead of changing the "home path"
(the path to backup), which was to be DH0: (my boot partition) I changed the
"backup path" (the path to write to) to DH0:. I had MRBackup set to format
disks when it is going to write to them. Consequently the program started
to format my hard disk and erased the rigid boot block and some of the DH0:
partition before the machine froze. All was lost.

My question is this:

	Is there some way to set a protection bit for the rigid boot block so
	  it can't be written to?

I know that one solution would be to pre-format disks so that MRBackup wouldn't
try to format my hard disk erroneously. Unfortunately, I have a lot of ANIM 
files that are over 1MB. MRBackup requires that you have to program set to 
format all disks itself to split large files over more than one disk. So that
is no really an option. 

Obviously I am planning on being much more careful in the future, but I would
like to have a little added protection for those late night sessions when I'm
not thinking clearly.

Any suggestions?

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