Club Amiga de Montreal - CAM/CAM_CD_1.iso/files/421.lha/EasyBackup/EasyBackup.doc.english.pp/EasyBackup.doc.english

Text File | 1990-10-05 | 5.6 KB | 118 lines

EasyBackup (c)1989 Oliver Enseling
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To prevent possible losses of data on a hard disk system it is indispensable
to backup the hard disk on further data storage units. If one ownes a streamer
or so this is no problem, but if you do not you are forced do use floppy disks
to backup your hard disk. EasyBackup consists fo two CLI commands that do
this job for you. There exists alredy a couple of similar programs, comercial
ones and soem in the PD pool. I do not know how the comercila ones work, because
I cannot afford to buy one, but the PD ones I know. Most of them use the
standard AmigaDOS disk structure to store data. Furthermore they mostly
optionally compress the data to save disk space but these two points make those
programmes darned slow. The exception is found in the PD program KwikBackup
that was contributed when the development of EasyBackup had already made
great progress. Besides there are some important options missing in KwikBackup
thus I want to contribute EasyBackup.
 To Easybackup belong the two CLI commands BACKUP and RESTORE. BACKUP serves
to back up the hard disk to floppy disks, that can be restored by the use of
RESTORE.

 To invoke BACKUP type:

BACKUP [FROM] <dir> [TO] <drive> [SINCE <date|LAST>] [APPEND <diskno>]
       [QUERY] [LIST <listfile>] [ARCHIVATE] [CHECKARCHIVE]

BACKUP stores the files foun in the AmigaDOS directory <dir> and its
subdirectories to floppy disks, to be inserted in disk drive <drive>.
<dir> can be any valid AmigaDOS path, while <drive> has to be one of
DF0: to DF3:. If BAVCKUP is called with <dir> and <drive> as only
arguments a complete hard disk backup is done starting with backup disk #1.
There exist a few further options that shell be explained.

SINCE <date|LAST>
 You can force BACKUP to store only those files, whose creation happened
after a certain date. To do so type SINCE <date> in the command line. <date>
has to be speciefied like dd.mm.yy. Note that the day comes first. (BACKUP
was originally a german program.) Instead of giving a certain date you can type
SINCE LAST what makes BACKUP use the date the last backup was done. This date
is automatically stored in the file "S:easybackup.config". This option is
extremely useful for craeting incremental backups.

APPEND <diskno>
 When doing an incremental backup it would be unsatisfactory to waste a lot
of disk space by beginning every incremental backup with a new set of
disks. Thus you can type APPEND <diskno> which will append the newly stored data
to the existing backup beginning at disk number <diskno>. It is recommended
that you specify the number of the last backup disk by <diskno>. If you specify
a number lower than the number of the last backup disk, disks are searched
through until the edn of the backup is found.

QUERY
 If you do not want to have all the files in a certain directory backed up
you can force BACKUP to ask for every file or subdirectory wether it should
be backed up or not. You have to type QUERY in the command line then.

LIST <listfile>
 To be able to know where which file can be found in the backup copy you
can have BACKUP to list the files, the disks they are on and their positions
on disk to a <listfile> by typing LIST <listfile>. If you specify PRT:
for <listfile> then the list goes to your printer. If BACKUP is unable
to open <listfile> the backup is done without listing.

ARCHIVATE
 The option ARCHIVATE causes BACKUP to set the Archive-Flags for every file
being backud up to mark them as being backed up. This may be useful to
cooperate with other backup programs.

CHECKARCHIVE
 If you type ARCHIVSTATUS only those files, that do not hav the Archive-Flag set
will be stored.

You can leave out the keywords FROM and TO if you want to. After BACKUP is started
the whole work will be done mostly automatically. You only have to change disks
when BACKUP tells you to. When a new disk has to be inserted BACKUP anounces
this with a beep, thus you do not have to stare at the screen all the time.
A disk change is being noticed automatically, thus you do not hav to press a
key or so. To backup one entire disk BACKUP usually takes 2 to 3 minutes,
depending on the speed of yourd hard disk. If and error occurs EasyBackup
informs you about and you are asked to continue or not. In any case data loss
is minimized. BACKUP does not compress any data, because this would
take a lot more of time although the disk space needed increases.

To start RESTORE type:

RESTORE [FROM] <drive> [TO] <dir> [PATTERN <pattern>] [START <startno>]
        [END <endno>] [QUERY] [ARCHIVATE]

RESTORE restores data from floppy disks to be inserted in disk drive <drive>
to the directory <dir> on your hard disk. If <dir> does not exists it is
being created. If only <dir> and <drive> are specified the entire backup
is restored. Besides the following options can be applied:

PATTERN <pattern>
 If you only want to restore certain files you can specify an AmigaDOS like
pattern containing wildcards. Only files that match this pattern are being
restored.

START <startno>
END <endno>
 If you merely want to restore e certain area of your backup you can specify
the number of the backup disk to start with (START <startno>) and the number
to end with (END <endno>).

QUERY
 By typing QUERY you force RESTORE to ask for each file or subdirectory on
the backup whether it should be restored or not.

ARCHIVATE
 If the Archive-Flag of the files that are restored should be set you have
to specify ARCHIVATE on the command line.

I hope that the application of RESTORE will not be necessary, but advice
everybody to back up the entire hard disk at least once a month with
incremental backups after every productive session.

OE