CompuServe Messages

Steve, To be honest, I haven't really looked at the PD hard disk backup programs much lately. When I last looked, some of the programs I looked at seemed to be lacking in a couple of areas: 1) – Speed. A couple of the programs were intent on performing heavy-duty file compression, which is very expensive in terms of time. saf-T-net does perform a limited type of file compression (results vary, but average about 10% savings) with virtually no loss in time (saf-T-net will fill a diskette in under 3 minutes – times should improve once the Fast File System is available). 2) – Floppy Disk Capacity. saf-T-net bypasses the standard DOS file system on the floppy disks and therefore doesn't incur the large overhead of the standard file system (837K of data per floppy disk). In fact, saf-T-net will effectively utilize 907.5K per floppy disk, with very little control overhead. 3) – Ease of use. saf-T-net's interface is totally Intuition based — no special command line switches to remember – just point and click. 4) – Recoverability. This is a big one. saf-T-net uses a redundent indexing process to keep track of what is contained on a backup set of diskettes – the first as a separate AmigaDOS file (which is easily re-buildable from the second indexing information), and also maintains imbedded indexing information within the backup data (ala ARC). Taking a hit on any of the backup diskettes will consequently have only a limited impact in terms of the loss of data. 5) – Recoverability, part 2. When performing a backup operation, if saf-T-net encounters a bad track when writing to the floppy disk, it will REFORMAT that track, and re-attempt to write to it. If that fails, it will consider that diskette bad, and attempt to restart itself at the end of the previous (good) diskette, and ask you to throw away the bad diskette. 6) – Support. Hope that answers your question…Bob