🚀 go-pugleaf

>|o You are frequently asked to put in a prior disk when doing a backup.
>  I've never had this happen to me.  It always asks for the disks in
>  sequnce and never asked for the same one twice.  This includes both
>   small and large (> 20 megabytes) backup.

Huumm, I was doing a 10MB backup (new smartset), and I had to insert the
first disc 3 times, and the 3rd disk twice, I'm using the same version
you are, there were lots of BIG (1 to 3 meg) files, pehaps that makes
a difference.

>|o Prompts you for EACH disk insertion, and requires a RESPONSE.  For a
>|  100 disk backup, that's over 100 button presses (see previous con).
>   It only requires a response the first time you add a disk to a set.  Once
>   it gives the disk a title it knows about, DiskFit recognizes the disk
>   as soon as you insert the disk.  It also autoformats disks that have
>   not been previously formmated (if they have, DiskFit requires that
>   you erase it by pressing a button).

This means if I'm doing an new big archive I have to press a lot of
buttons.  This is precisely when I DON'T want to press a lot of buttons.
Oh yeah, another complaint, if you insert a 400K formatted disc, you'll
only get 400K on it, you can't reformat it to 800K in the middle of a
backup.  Having lots of discs lying around from my 128K mac days makes
this policy really irritating.  FastBack also autoformats, and if you
put in a 400K disc, and you are in 800K mode it reformats it (and the
same goes for 800K disks during a 400K backup).

>|o Doesn't tell you how many disks it needs until AFTER you start your
>|  backup (and even then, it's usually off by 1-3 disks).
>   I've never seen it miss the count.  How large of a disk are you backing
>   up (mine is a 40 mb DataFrame)?

Again, my test backups contained lots of LARGE files, again, mabey it
just isn't as elegant under those conditions.

>One question for you about FastBack is how well does it handle losing
>a backup disk.  I used to use HFS Backup (I think) until one of the backup
>disks went bad and I found out my whole backup (some 20 odd disks at the time)
>was useless.  Since FastBack uses its own format, I would be worried about
>how it handled bad disks in the backup.  With DiskFit, if a disk goes bad,
>you can hit the Missing button and it will request a new disk to replace
>the bad one, and continue on as if nothing happened.

That depends on what you mean by "goes bad".  If after a good backup, one
of your archive discs gets screwed up, you would be able to recover any
files that weren't on that disc.  If you also lost the catalog disc and
had to rebuild it, that could be a problem.  I have never had a bad disc
when it is initially doing an archive, but from what I hear, it starts from
the beginning again (the PC version asks for a new disc).  Since I don't
have first hand experiance, I am not sure.  If it does start over, that is
quite a CON, but I'm sure if it doesn't just ask for a new good disc, it
will soon, since they seem to know they should do it that way.  In summary,
if you had a disc go bad in the middle of an archive, AND your catalog
disc was also fried, you would be able to rebuild a section of the backup, 
but would loose any files which resided partially or in whole on the bad 
disc.

Ya know, come to think of it, if DiskFit would offer me three more features,
I would like it enough to use it:

1) Partial backups of any combination of files and folders
2) Partial restore of any combination of files or folders into the place
   in the file hierarchy they came from
3) Option to NOT DELETE the old files on my archive, and just have a REAL
   incremental backup. 


>Jerry Whitnell				Been through Hell?
>Communication Solutions, Inc.		What did you bring back for me?
>						- A. Brilliant

--------------------
Ken Wallich			*My views are mine, and mine alone*
Consultant			"Slimey? Mud Hole? my HOME this is!"
DCI 				kwallich@hpsmtc1.HP.COM
@Hewlett Packard		...hplabs!hpsmtc1!kwallich

"If we weren't all crazy, we'd all go INSANE"