Quarterback V1.4 Release Notes March 10, 1988 Thank you for purchasing Quarterback. We have put a lot of effort into making Quarterback as reliable as possible. We made some last-minute changes to it after the manual was printed, and we noticed a few things which are not clearly explained in the manual. We suggest that you print these notes and keep a copy with your Quarterback manual. If you call us for support, please have your serial number and version number ready. The serial number is on the Quarterback master diskette label. The version number appears in the title bar of the Quarterback window. Be sure to send us your postage-paid warranty card. It costs you only a few seconds of your time, but we are much more receptive to your call if your card is already in our files. Our business hours are 8:30AM to 5:00PM Pacific time. GENERAL NOTES In our own testing of Quarterback, we can backup a full 20MB CLtd hard disk in about 39 minutes in the fastest mode (write verification disabled and archive bits not set). Your results may vary, depending on the speed of your hard drive and the degree of fragmentation of your files. Quarterback stores its parameter file, QB.OPT, in the S: directory. This directory is normally found on the Workbench disk in DF0. Most hard disk users use the AmigaDOS ASSIGN command to assign the S: subdirectory to their hard disk. You may wish to add this command to your startup-sequence. Otherwise, you may be asked to put your Workbench disk back into a drive so that Quarterback can find the parameter file. After you have begun a restore operation using DF0, and Quarterback has already taken over DF0, you will not be able to use DF0 to access the S: subdirectory. In this case you must wait until after you have completed the restore in order to save your options. We have added a new option for both backup and restore which allows you to write the archive/restoration report to disk instead of printing it. If you specify "disk" as the destination of the report, Quarterback asks for the device and path to the directory into which you want the report written. You can specify any valid AmigaDOS device and path. The device:path you specify is saved along with the other options, and is automatically restored when you invoke Quarterback. If you do not specify a device:path for the report, it is written to the device and directory which is current when you start Quarterback. If you are a "power user" and you wish to use Quarterback without going through all of the normal Quarterback dialog, you may wish to invoke Quarterback from CLI with a parameter file, as described in the Quarterback manual. Quarterback can also be invoked with parameters via the CLI command line, which is not described in the manual. Command line parameters are the same as for a command file. The INCLUDEALL and EXCLUDEALL keywords defined in the Quarterback manual have been eliminated. Instead, the INCLUDE and EXCLUDE keywords accept a parameter of ALL for the file name. Therefore, you cannot INCLUDE or EXCLUDE a file named ALL in a command file or on the command line. For example, to invoke Quarterback to backup word processing documents which have changed since the last backup in subdirectory WP on DH0, you would type: QUARTERBACK BACKUP DH0:WP EXCLUDE ALL ARCHIVE Command line or command file parameters can be in any order, but are executed in the order listed. Some keywords make no sense if executed in the wrong order. So be sure that you consider the effects of each keyword as you decide the order to enter them. For example, it makes no sense to follow DATE xx-mmm-yy with INCLUDE ALL. The maximum path length supported by Quarterback is 256 characters, including the device/volume name. Gadgets for selecting the floppy disk drives have been changed on the BACKUP OPTIONS screen and removed from the RESTORE OPTIONS screen. Backup and restore now support the use of DF0, DF1, DF2, or DF3. Backup can use one or two drives. Restore uses only a single drive. Menu items are disabled when the backup or restore is active. If you think you may need another CLI, open it before you proceed from the Options window. Quarterback does NOT support the full wild card options of AmigaDOS. Wild cards are limited to ? anywhere in a name, and #? appearing ONCE in a name, such as: #GA?E?.c or files#? Abort gadgets appear on several screens in Quarterback. Quarterback checks the abort gadget periodically, usually when it has finished performing some major activity, such as backing up or restoring an entire file. Thus, if you click on an abort gadget you may not see any response for several seconds. The natural temptation is to click a few more times to "wake up" Quarterback. This may create undesirable actions, since the extra clicks are usually saved, and may be acted upon in order when Quarterback finally looks for them. When Quarterback sends a report to the printer, the printer usually holds many lines of text in its buffer. Therefore, if you abort a report, the printer may continue to print for some time before stopping. Don't remove Quarterback disks while the drive light is on. And be sure to remove Quarterback disks when warned. AmigaDOS doesn't like Quarterback disks. Disks formatted by Quarterback can be copied/verified using the AmigaDOS Diskcopy utility. Quarterback has very low overhead per file. The catalog entry is about 25 bytes per file (depending on the length of the file name and possible file comments). There is a 14-byte ID per disk drive. Each file is stored as pure data. No compression is used, other than the fact that Quarterback has much lower overhead per file than AmigaDOS, and consequently is able to store more useful data per floppy than AmigaDOS. BACKUP NOTES If you have partitioned your hard disk, you must backup or restore each partition as a different device. When Quarterback builds a catalog of files to backup it automatically scans down through all levels of the directory tree structure, starting at the device or device/path that you specify. If you wish to include files from any directory on a drive, you should specify just the device itself, so that Quarterback can scan from the root directory down through all levels of the structure. If you know that you want only files from a single directory and nothing else, you should specify the full device/path to that directory. When Quarterback has built the complete catalog, you can then select the individual files or groups of files to be included in (or excluded from) the backup. All files are "included" when Quarterback first displays the catalog. If you wish only to backup one or two files, you should first "exclude" all files, then "include" only the ones you really want. You can move down or up the tree, including or excluding files as you wish, until you have identified all files to be processed. Then you are ready to proceed with the backup. A new option affecting how subdirectories are backed up has been added to the BACKUP OPTIONS screen. It is: Backup full subdirectory structure: YES NO If you select YES, Quarterback includes all subdirectories in the backup catalog, even if a subdirectory is empty (contains no files or other sub- directories). This takes up only a little more room in the catalog of the first backup disk, but makes it possible for you to restore the empty sub- directories, if you wish (using the Restore Full Subdirectory Structure option described below). You might want to do this if you are performing a full restore to a replacement disk drive, and you want the restored disk to have the exact same directory structure as the original drive. If you select NO, Quarterback includes only those subdirectories in the backup catalog which contain files or other subdirectories to be backed up. Quarterback can now use any of the standard floppy drives, DF0-DF3, for backup. Any pair of these drives is also valid. However, no more than two floppies can be used for backup. During backup, Quarterback writes a unique identification code to each disk, including a sequence number and the date and time of the backup. On restore, Quarterback checks each disk for the proper sequence number, and the date and time. The date/time stamp allows Quarterback to detect intermixing of disks from different sets of backups. Quarterback can be directed to read each track of the backup disks after writing. If Quarterback finds an unusable track on a disk during backup, it warns you and asks you to replace the bad disk with another disk. It then resets itself to the beginning of that disk and continues. The new disk replaces the bad disk in its entirety. You need not retain the bad disk. You CANNOT overwrite an individual file on an existing set of backup disks. Each backup operation completely erases any previous data on a set of disks. Quarterback does NOT allow you to "add" more files to an existing backup set of disks. The "incremental" backup mode always produces a new set of disks which contain only those files which have changed since some previous backup. When you perform an incremental backup you must also retain the previous set of backup disks. Quarterback may encounter illegal file names, such as "*" when it builds the catalog of files. Such file names cannot be processed by Quarterback, and are automatically excluded from the catalog and from the backup. If Quarterback cannot open a file or detects a read error in a file during the backup, it fills the space allocated for the file on the backup disk with random data, warns you with a message on the screen, and marks the file name with *** ERROR *** on the archive report. However, the file does appear in the backup catalog, even though the data in the file is useless. This happens because the catalog is written to the first diskette, long before Quarterback discovers the problem. If you attempt to restore such a file, you will find the contents useless. During restore, you should exclude any files which are marked *** ERROR *** on the backup report. RESTORE NOTES Quarterback now restores comments, protection bits, and the date/time stamp on all files AND directories. The restore option called "Create Subdirectories, as necessary" has been eliminated. In its place you will find a new restore option affecting the way empty subdirectories are handled. It is: Restore full subdirectory structure: YES NO If you are restoring to a device/path which already has a subdirectory structure which matches the catalog on the backup disks, this option has no effect. If you select YES, Quarterback restores all subdirectories found in the backup catalog, even if the new subdirectory will be empty. If you select NO, Quarterback restores only those subdirectories which contain files marked for restoration. You should set this option to "NO" if you are restoring just a few files to a device which already has the desired subdirectory structure in place. Specify "NO" to avoid creating a bunch of empty directories which are of no use to you. Creating all those empty subdirectories can takes many minutes. User beware! If you restore to a different subdirectory on the same device, you may run out of room on that device, especially if you specify that the full sub- directory structure is to be restored. Restore uses only a single floppy drive, with no automatic switching of floppy disk drives. You can use any one of the available floppy drives for the restore, but only one. Our reasoning for this limit is that restore is a critical process, and even though it may take some time, you should give it your total attention. Quarterback performs many error checks during restore. If it finds an error, the recovery from that error is much more complicated if there are two floppy drives involved, both for the user and the program. For restore, we have moved the floppy drive option from the options screen to the device screen, so that Quarterback can know which disk drive to use for reading the catalog, which is stored on the first disk of the backup set. We have added an additional restore option, "Set archive bit for restored files". If you select "YES" Quarterback sets the archive bit for all files it restores; if you select "NO" Quarterback restores the archive bit as it was saved at the time of the backup. Note: during backup, the archive bit is set AFTER the file is successfully backed up. Therefore the archive bit may not actually show up as set when the file is restored, unless you invoke this restore option. Restoring a set of files takes longer than backing up that same set of files. This is because of the extra steps necessary to restore the protection bits and the date/time stamp on each restored file. Restore also performs many other data integrity checks which you may never run across, unless you have a corrupted directory or have damaged your backup disks. During a restore operation, Quarterback replaces existing files if duplicates are found on the target device. Each original file is effectively erased before its replacement is copied from floppy. This means that if the replacement cannot be properly restored, the original is gone, and neither is available. Beware. This is to minimize disk usage. If you want to avoid the dangers of losing your original files and then having the restore fail, we suggest restoring your files to a different subdirectory or to a different device. That way you can verify the integrity of the replacements before deleting the originals. If Quarterback cannot restore a file because of a bad disk, or if some other error prevents the successful restoration of a file, Quarterback marks the bad file on the restoration report by adding "ERROR" to the line where the file name appears. During a restore operation, if a disk of the backup set becomes unreadable, or you cannot find one of the disks, Quarterback lets you skip the bad or missing disk and continue with the restoration. Of course, all files which would have been restored from that disk cannot be restored, and are marked "error" on the restoratiuon report. You CANNOT skip the first disk, since the catalog of files is stored on the first disk. GOOD LUCK! Here's hoping that you never need to use Quarterback to restore your hard disk. And thank's for your support! George and Betty Chamberlain Central Coast Software