🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <22492@mimsy.umd.edu> bane@mimsy.umd.edu (John R. Bane) writes:
>Does there exist, PD/shareware/commercial software for the ST that can do
>a RAM image dump at intervals to help you recover from crashes?  The
>phantom typist bit my wife again twice today; the first time she was
>able to mouse Save and reboot with no damage done -- the second time
>she lost an hour's work and her temper.

Switchback can sort of do what you want. You can use it to partition your
ST memory into chunks of 512K, 1meg, or 2meg (don't remember if there were
other supported sizes) and run different programs in each partition, or
take snapshots of the current partition and save them in other partitions.
Then you run their buffer utility to save a partition to disk.

The switchback software could probably be altered to not use partitions,
and just dump and restore all of memory as a single block, but it would need
about 4K for control info. (That's how much it eats out of each of the
partitions it sets up.)

(I just bought one of these a couple weeks ago; I like it a lot. Really
slick. Of course, I use it with a Mega-4, with more RAM in an UltraDisk,
so I can really put this thing thru its paces...) It's unfortunate that
Alpha Systems no longer makes their UltraDisks - 4meg of memory there is
quite the handy thing to have. I can run Minix in 4 meg and TOS in another
4 meg, and swap between the two at the touch of a button. Also, since the
UltraDisk is battery backed up, if your machine locks up, as long as you
had a copy of the current image stored there, you can just toggle the
power and swap it back in and keep right on running. This is one of the
most awesome hardware/software combos I've seen for the ST; I'm kind of
surprised more people aren't using it.

I don't have their number handy right now, but you should be able to look
'em up in most ST magazines. I ordered Switchback straight from them and
got it via UPS in 3 days. It works really well, I like it a lot...

(No affiliation, just a satisfied customer...)
--
  -- Howard Chu @ University of Michigan