CompuServe Messages

Malcolm, I can speak a little about Back-Pac – it's a relative of mine. It started out in life called "saf-T-net", which I wrote, and which was one of the first commercial hard disk backup utilities available. It's only competition at the time of publication were two programs: a commercial offering called HardHat, which basically took approximately 20 minutes to fill a single floppy disk, and a freely-distributable alpha release of a program called BRU, written by Fred Fish. HardHat disappeared, and BRU eventually grew up a little bit, and is now the backbone behind the HDBackup front-end. BRU was the reason I wrote saf-T-net. <grin> It's also the major reason why I'd advise against using HDBackup. Aside from some basic design decisions in BRU that are done for cross-machine portablitiy issues, BRU is a reasonable implementation. Unfortunately, the biggest problem with it is that it uses a lot of space for the backed up data – much more than any of the other available choices. On top of that, I've heard of too many horror stories of folks who have trusted HDBackup, only to run into severe problems when they needed to restore their data from backup. As to BackPac, I can't speak for the changes that the current developer made to my original, as I've not seen the product — only the demo version that was uploaded here a while ago. I know he re-designed the interface a little bit (for the better), adding a more 2.0-like 3-D look. The basic engine of the program was always quite reliable for me (I used saf-T-net quite a lot :-), and I trusted it. It's major problem was a limited design that kept it from growing – it didn't support any backup medium other than floppy disks. I stopped using it when I added a tape drive to my system. Hope this helps… – BobR