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- Path: menudo.uh.edu!usenet
- From: mschwage@next3.corp.mot.com (Mike Schwager)
- Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews
- Subject: REVIEW: Ami-Back 2.0
- Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.applications
- Date: 25 Feb 1994 17:03:16 GMT
- Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett
- Lines: 373
- Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator)
- Distribution: world
- Message-ID: <2klb0k$ni8@menudo.uh.edu>
- Reply-To: mschwage@next3.corp.mot.com (Mike Schwager)
- NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu
- Keywords: hard drive, backups, commercial
-
-
- PRODUCT NAME
-
- Ami-Back, version 2.0g
-
- [MODERATOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on Mar 01, 1994.
- Search for the text "[UPDATE:" to find updated information.
- -Dan]
-
-
- BRIEF DESCRIPTION
-
- Hard disk backup software for the Amiga.
-
-
- AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION
-
- Name: Moonlighter Software Development
- Address: 3208-C East Colonial Drive, Suite 204
- Orlando, Florida 32803
- USA
-
- Phone: (407) 384-9484
- Fax: (407) 384-9391
-
-
- LIST PRICE
-
- $79.95 (US). I paid about $45 (US) for it.
-
-
- SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS
-
- HARDWARE
-
- The program has no official RAM requirements, but I
- recommend 1 MB of RAM or more.
-
-
- SOFTWARE
-
- None
-
-
- COPY PROTECTION
-
- None
-
-
- MACHINE USED FOR TESTING
-
- Amiga 500, Rev. 5 Motherboard, 1 Meg Agnus installed.
- 2 Meg Fast RAM (3 Meg RAM total).
- 52 Meg hard drive, Supra SCSI controller.
- 1 external 880K floppy.
- AmigaDOS 1.3.
-
- Amiga 500, Rev. 5 Motherboard, 1 Meg Agnus.
- CSA Mega Midget Racer 68030 accelerator.
- 4 Meg Fast RAM (5 Meg RAM total).
- 157 Meg hard drive, Supra SCSI controller.
- 1 external 880K floppy.
- AmigaDOS 1.3.
-
- [UPDATE: The original review omitted the CSA accelerator above.
- - Dan]
-
-
- INTRODUCTION
-
- Summary (out of 5 stars, with a '+' for extra points):
-
- Manual: *****
- Tech Support: **+
- Robustness: **+
- Ease of use: ***+
- Overall: ***
-
- Ami-Back bills itself as "The Ultimate Backup Utility". I don't know
- about that. To me, the ultimate utility would be rock-solid, very easy to
- set up and use, fast, and worry-free. Personally, I would bill Ami-Back as
- "The Pretty Good Backup Utility". It comes up short in some ways. It is an
- almost-good product. Were it less buggy, I would be very, very happy.
-
- Ami-Back comes on 1 disk, and includes versions for both the
- AmigaDOS 1.3 and 2.0. I'm still an AmigaDOS 1.3 user, so that's the only
- version I was able to test. Your mileage may differ.
-
- [MODERATOR'S NOTE: It turns out that I am an Ami-Back user too.
- Some of the features (and problems) of Ami-Back described in this
- review are different in the AmigaDOS 2.0 version. - Dan]
-
-
- INSTALLATION
-
- Installation was simple. Pop the disk in the drive, double click the
- Install icon, and away it goes. There's not a whole lot to it. Ami-Back
- just puts the binaries and libraries in their proper places. In "Expert"
- install mode, you are able to place the binaries wherever you'd like.
-
- After installation, you either double-click on Ami-Back's icon, or
- run Ami-Back from the CLI. Personally, I'm a CLI user. Ami-Back opens up
- its own non-interlaced screen. The colors are not settable, but they're a
- reasonable mix of gray, white, and black. Pretty utilitarian, but then
- that's what it's all about, no? The main screen is very simple - logo and
- copyright information on the left, and 4 large buttons on the right:
- "Backup", "Restore", "Scheduler", and "Quit". I have not used the scheduler
- at all, as I'm a poor old floppy drive user who must be there when the
- backups are running. "Backup" and "Restore" are naturally the more
- important buttons here.
-
- At this point, I should mention that the manual, though not verbose,
- is really quite adequate for the job. Often, I will want to skim over a
- manual, looking for the meaty stuff and mentally throwing away the
- nonessentials. Sometimes that gets me into trouble as I might miss an
- important item in my haste. Ami-Back's manual is clear and gets right to
- the point. It takes you through the necessary steps, in the order you need
- to do them, to get your backup going. I followed the manual pretty closely
- when first using the program. It coincides with the program and its
- structure and order very well.
-
- The first thing you do is configure the program. There are three
- menus on the main Ami-Back screen, and under the Preferences menu is the
- "Program Configuration" item. Configuring the program mostly means
- specifying the locations of the various log and configuration files for your
- different backups. The default locations are the s: directory, but you can
- change them here.
-
- Once you've saved the program configuration, you need to set up a
- backup configuration. The backup configuration window contains most of the
- important backup file and directory selection filters and gadgets. It's
- where most of the work is done to get Ami-Back set up. You select the "New
- Configuration" menu item to give your configuration a name. Then you select
- the "Backup Configuration" menu item. This procedure is a little confusing
- (you can forget to select "New Configuration"), so you need to take care
- that you're saving the proper config file with the proper config selections.
-
- In the Backup Configuration screen, all your disk devices show up as
- icons near the top. You can select as many as you'd like with the mouse, or
- go ahead and type directory or partition names in the string gadget just
- below the icons, separating them with a space. You can then select a
- destination which can be floppies, a tape drive, an AmigaDOS file, or one of
- your partitions. You can select the backup type; Ami-Back will do standard
- AmigaDOS partitions as well as image backups of UNIX and/or Mac partitions.
- You can choose to verify the backup or not, and you can set up a filename or
- directory filter. I hope they improve that filter; it was rather confusing
- to use. It can use a facelift. I don't use it much. It looks like it's
- pretty powerful, but for what I do it's not worth any hassle. For example,
- AmiBack is fast enough that I just let it back up my #?.o files in my work
- directories. You can also tell AmiBack to backup files only within a
- certain date range.
-
- Additionally, there are a bunch of little buttons that control
- various things: whether to set the archive bit after backing a file up,
- whether to turn on compression, whether or not you want Ami-Back to warn you
- before it overwrites a floppy, etc.
-
-
- BACKUPS
-
- Once you are done setting up the backup configuration, you save it.
- Now you can load it whenever you want to do that particular backup. Once the
- proper configuration is loaded, all you need to do is click the "Backup"
- button on the main screen.
-
- After you click the "Backup" button, AmiBack will scan the entire
- partition(s). Normally this goes quite quickly, say within a minute or two
- for a 10 Meg partition, but having fancy filters will slow it down. Once it
- completes the scan, a "Backup Information" screen shows up. There, all kinds
- of useful information is shown: estimated and actual Files, Bytes, and
- Disks used, bar meters showing percent completion on the current media and
- on the backup as a whole, the name of the file currently being compressed
- and backed up, status of the backup destination devices (Ready, Not Ready,
- or In Use), time spent backing up, time spent waiting for the user, and
- estimated time till completion (of the backup, of course).
-
- At this point you have the option of starting the backup or
- canceling it and redoing your configuration. Click on Begin, and away you
- go! Ami-Back does not assume that the floppies currently in the drives are
- backup disks. You must pop in the disks after hitting "Begin"; a nice little
- safety feature. However, you can tell AmiBack not to put up a requestor
- prior to writing to each floppy after the first ones. Personally, I like
- having that feature. I just keep all nonessential floppies out of harm's
- way. But realize that it can be dangerous.
-
- Once AmiBack starts, it watches the floppy drives asynchronously.
- This means that after Ami-Back finishes writing to a disk (say, in DF0:), it
- continues writing to your other floppy (say, DF1:). While it is writing,
- you can pop out the old floppy in DF0: and insert a new one. Ami-Back
- displays helpful messages like "DF0: Not Ready" when it's time to change the
- disk in DF0:, and "DF0: Ready" after you have inserted a new disk. If you
- are vigilant, backups go about as fast as it takes to write continuously to
- the floppy drives, even with a 68000-based Amiga.
-
-
- PERFORMANCE
-
- AmiBack uses 44K of Chip RAM and 283K of Fast RAM when it is first
- loaded. It uses more RAM depending on how much data you are trying to back
- up. For example, backing up a 10 Meg partition with 1,300 files causes an
- additional 66K of Fast RAM to be used. So I'd say it's not well suited for
- Amigas with only 512K RAM, but it should work OK in 1 Meg.
-
- AmiBack multitasks quite well. Naturally you must make sure that
- you don't need your floppies while running your backups (if you back up to
- floppy). However, you can pretty much do whatever else you want while the
- backups are running. The usual caveats apply when trying to do "Live"
- backups. As with any machine, if your data is important to you, it's best
- to just leave the computer alone until backups have finished.
-
- AmiBack didn't seem to exhibit any anomalies with other software on
- the Amiga. I have all sorts of little utilities running on my machine and I
- didn't notice any incompatibilities.
-
- [MODERATOR'S NOTE: Ami-Back 2.0 exhibits Enforcer hits if you have
- the ASDG Dual Serial Card siosbx.device mounted. However, Ami-Back
- 2.0h fixes this problem. (The software patch is free and on Aminet
- and the Moonlighter BBS.) - Dan]
-
- This software cranks when backing up to floppies. I can do 50 Meg
- in a couple of hours, user time and backup time included. AmiBack uses a
- non-DOS disk format, which is good I think. The disks get written to and
- verified as fast as, say, doing a DiskCopy (with verify). This is even on
- my 68000-based setup. On my last backup with the 68030 accelerator, I was
- timing floppies at about 1-1/2 minutes each. I guess this speed may be
- because the compression is not as outstanding as it could be. My latest
- backups took 41 disks for about 50 Meg or so of files - with compression on.
- I should mention that perhaps 2 or 3 Meg of that is "lha" files, which
- won't compress any more no matter what you do.
-
-
- RESTORING
-
- I've never done a full restore for a broken hard disk. However, I
- just ran a selective restore to restore a single file. It was quick and
- easy. You go to the "Restore Configuration" menu, which takes you to the
- Restore Configuration screen. There you can tell AmiBack where to put your
- restored files, what media the files are on, whether you want to do a
- selective or complete restore, whether to overwrite existing files, etc.
- Once configured to your liking, you click the "Use" button. This gets you
- back to the main screen where you can now click the "Restore" button.
- AmiBack will ask for the name of the index file which it created when it did
- the backup. Once installed, AmiBack seems to know exactly where the file is
- stored. Right away it asked me to insert disk 5 of my backup, and within
- nary two minutes, my 500K lha file was restored. It took maybe 4-5 minutes,
- start to finish.
-
-
- AREXX
-
- AmiBack claims to provide AREXX support. I didn't test this feature.
-
-
- DOCUMENTATION
-
- A 70-page User Guide. Short, sweet, to the point. I give the
- manual an 'A'. (*****)
-
-
- LIKES AND DISLIKES
-
- The floppy disk write routines are excellent. This thing goes fast!
-
- The file filter configuration is frustrating and confusing. I spent
- a long time trying to figure out how to get it to backup only 1 directory and
- all its contents. Impossible to do from the file filter; you must do that
- on the Backup Configuration screen. Well, I couldn't figure out how to do
- it there until through a stroke of luck I was able to speak with the right
- guy at Moonlighter. See the "Bugs" section for more information.
-
- If one of your disks goes bad in the middle of a backup, AmiBack
- knows how to backtrack to the beginning of that disk, and you can put in a
- new one. Ahhh...! So nice.
-
-
- COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS
-
- I don't know about any others. Is ExpressCopy still out there?
- Well, it was a buggy piece of junk. I received it from Supra with a ROM
- upgrade a couple of years back, and forget it!
-
- I've used Matt Dillon's backup program, and though that works ok
- it's not nearly as fast or convenient as Ami-Back. It's really nice not to
- have to redo an entire backup after the 10th disk out of 11 turns out to
- have an error.
-
- Using "lha" or a similar compression program seems like too much of
- a hassle. AmiBack is sweet in that it combines a lot of flexibility,
- configurability, and usefulness in one package.
-
- Quarterback seems to be the one other big player in the Amiga market.
- Unfortunately I don't know how it compares to Ami-Back.
-
-
- BUGS
-
- Some scary ones at the beginning. I couldn't get the software to
- "label" a backup, so I just don't use that feature. It would guru
- invariably when I tried. And, some 33% of the time the software would guru
- just as I tried to start a backup. My last phone call to Tech Support
- brought an enlightened soul, who suggested I remove the configuration file.
- That seemed to work. Subsequently, I couldn't get it to guru at all during
- my last backup.
-
- But, during my last backup I had another scary happenstance. It was
- backing up a partition, and I had left the room. When I came back I see the
- floppy drive is spinning but AmiBack doesn't seem to be doing a dang thing.
- The only thing that's happening is the "Backup Time" clock is advancing. It
- wouldn't respond to any controls. So, I had to reboot my machine. A
- subsequent backup of the same partition worked properly. Well, I haven't
- tried to restore from it however....
-
- During my last Tech Support call to the Enlightened Voice, I
- discovered that unless you hit a return in the Backup Configuration's
- "Source" string gadget, partitions or directories typed there will not be
- accepted. This was the cause of much frustration for me. So you need to
- make sure you put a return after the last word in the string gadget!
-
- One time I went to Load a Configuration, and I got a tone through my
- speaker. My machine was locked up. That was just once, though.
-
-
- VENDOR SUPPORT
-
- You may call Moonlighter Software for Tech Support, 9am-5pm, Monday
- through Friday. They are on the East coast of the USA. The guys there
- seemed moderately knowledgeable. As I mentioned above, the last time I
- called, the voice on the other end diagnosed my one bug as a probable
- configuration file problem, and told me to reload it. Previously, another
- voice said something like "Gee, I don't know... I've seen that problem...
- we'll have to take a look at that." I felt sort of like I had heard, "the
- check's in the mail." Reportedly, they have Bix accounts and Bix gateways to
- the Internet, but I never got responses to my email. Maybe it never got
- there.
-
- Also, on the support BBS they say there's minor upgrades. I haven't
- tried the support BBS.
-
- Overall, support gets a 'C'. (**+)
-
-
- WARRANTY
-
- "As is."
-
-
- CONCLUSION
-
- AmiBack was a little more of a hassle to get going than I would have
- liked. I have a pet peeve about backup software: make it one zillion
- percent robust, simple (or at least, look simple), robust, relatively easy
- to learn, and did I mention that it has to be robust? One doesn't mess
- around when hours and hours - nay, even man-years - of work are at stake.
- AmiBack gets a B for simplicity, a C for robustness, a B+ for ease of
- learning. Overall, I give it a B- (***). It's a decent program, to be
- sure. I wish I felt just a little more at ease with it. "Bullet Proof Data
- Backup Protection for the Amiga" does not Guru because it's unhappy with the
- config file, nor spin my floppy drive aimlessly.
-
- However, it is fast. I like how it handles the floppies. It is
- quite configurable, and in all fairness it is a very thoughtful program.
- It's nice that they remember us lowly 1.3 Amigans. And there has never been
- a bug so nasty as to make it unusable. In short, I use it on a regular
- basis. And that, dear friends, is why they make backup software.
-
-
- COPYRIGHT NOTICE
-
- Copyright 1994 by Mike Schwager. All rights reserved.
-
- Everyone has permission to spread this far and wide over the known
- galaxy. Go ahead and quote bits and pieces of it if you like. Just don't
- alter its contents, and make sure to credit me with the text.
-
- ---
-
- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews
- Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu
- Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu
- Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu
- Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews
-