***************************** TURBOBACKUP.DOC *********************** DISCLAIMER ---------- Copyright 1988 by Steffen Stempel and Martin Kopp. You may distribute this program for non-commercial purposes. You are encouraged to make as much copies of TURBOBACKUP as you like as long as you're not violating any of the statements below. - Nobody except the authors are allowed to gain any profit by using and/or distributing this program. This includes the duplication of commercial disks. - Nobody is allowed to change any part of the following files: TURBOBACKUPV1.00 TURBOBACKUP.doc TURBOBACKUP.readme ReadMe.First Execute.Me - If you are giving this program to someone else, it is your responsibility that these files are unchanged and that the person receiving TURBOBACKUP agrees to this disclaimer. - To protect them from getting lost or changed we decided to permit distribution only in one of these three forms: - the complete directory TurboBackupV1.00 (including all files mentioned above and the file TurboBackupV1.00.info with the icon.) - the file TurboBackupV1.00.arc (including the same files as the directory and the file Execute.Me which renames the files in the ARCchieve to their original names.) - both the above. - We encourage people who want to distribute TURBOBACKUP on their commercial disks. BUT you must contact Martin Kopp at the address below to get a special marked version that shows that you are entitled to distribute it. You also have to provide two versions of your program to the authors. (Little fee for providing your customers with a reliable backup-program and having minor trouble replacing disks!) - The authors have tested the program very intensive. BUT we can not give you any warranty regarding the function of the program itself or the reliability of the copies made with it (Sorry guy's but no commercial program can provide such a warranty nor can we do it with our program.) - Any questions regarding the above stated distribution on commercial disks, any error reports (not missing features, that would be too much to handle because we already got a 5 pages long list of features we would like to add !!!), any letters to encourage our work (please send NO money or other 'payment') should be directed to: MARTIN KOPP FRANKENSTRASSE 34 D-6800 MANNHEIM 52 West Germany - You as the user are responsible not to violate any copyright or law by using TURBOBACKUP. THE SPEED OF TURBOBACKUP ------------------------ Phenomenalistically !!! (Applause 8-} ) About 103.5 seconds for one source one destination less than 140 seconds for two destinations less than 175 seconds for three destinations Anyone who claims to be much faster cannot do any verify at all! (This is physically not possible with our hardware like it is!) How to start TURBOBACKUP (display modes, syntax): ------------------------------------------------- TURBOBACKUP has two general display modes: window and screen. In the window-mode you will get an unsizeable window with deptharrangers on your workbench screen. It is little smaller than a normal NTSC-WB-screen. So you can still grab the screen titlebar and click on icons that you have positioned rightmost on the WB. In the screen mode you will get a two-plane workbench-color dragable screen with deptharrangers. Then you should not have any problems with using the Workbench. You can select these modes on startup using: WORKBENCH By using the 'INFO' item of the Workbench menu and inserting a "DISPLAYMODE=screen" into the tooltype gadget you will get the screen mode on startup. If not, TURBOBACKUP will start in a window. There are no other selections possible. CLI You may start TURBOBACKUP from CLI using the following syntax: TURBOBACKUPV1.00 [DFs: to DFt:[,DFu:[DFv:]]] [-s] where [...] means that this part is optional. The selected source and destination drives will be selected in the display. If you specify -s you will get the screen mode. If TURBOBACKUP encounters any serious problems during startup (like insufficient memory) it will not crash but specify the problem and then gracefully abort. By the way, TURBOBACKUP will not start until all floppy-disk drives are 'not busy' to prevent you from getting confusing results. HOW TO USE TURBOBACKUP ---------------------- After startup you see the TURBOBACKUP display with four grids, one for each drive. Located below each of these grids is a gadget that toggles between 'OFF' 'SOURCE' and 'DEST'. Chose the combination you want to use by either clicking on these gadgets, using the keys '0' to '3' to toggle them or 'F1' to 'F4' for SOURCE, 'F5' to 'F9' for DESTINATION or shift 'F1' to 'F4' for OFF for the respective drive. Then click on 'Start' or type 'S'. If you want to abort a backup select 'Abort' or type 'A'. If you want to make a retry after TURBOBACKUP detects an error, select 'Retry' or press 'R'. If you copy to multiple destination drives you may cancel one of the destination copies by selecting 'Remove' or the corresponding number on the keypad. The other copies will be continued. You can leave TURBOBACKUP by selecting 'Quit' or pressing Shift-'Q'. HOW TO USE MULTITASKING ----------------------- TURBOBACKUP multitasks like a charm! But there are some points you have to be aware of: TURBOBACKUP allocates EVERY floppy-disk-drive in the system. So you have to load those programs you want to use along with TURBOBACKUP from harddisk, ramdisk, net or before you start TURBOBACKUP. All drives will again become available when you leave TURBOBACKUP. It should be possible to make TURBOBACKUP resident. You may use this as a work around for the missing directory-feature. By the way, TURBOBACKUP only takes a small amount of the processor time. So multitasking REALLY makes sense ! TURBOBACKUP MESSAGES -------------------- TURBOBACKUP displays messages in the lower right box. It will constantly display its state (running, aborted, finished etc.). In addition the grids will display graphically the progress for each cylinder by letters 'r' 'w' 'v' on background color for side one and on black for side zero. Every time TURBOBACKUP encounters an error it will automatically retry four times. If successful it will say so in the message window and draw an orange box around the corresponding cylinder in the display. If the error persists, the screen will be flashed three times and TURBOBACKUP will release three short, high beeps. You can determine the exact cylinder and side of the error in the textdisplay. You may then select 'Retry', 'Abort' or 'Remove' (if applicable). Two cylinders before the copy would be finished, TURBOBACKUP will flash the screen one time and release one long, deep sound. This will make you aware that soon there will be work for you. So you can finish your other work and loose no time. When the copy process is finished, TURBOBACKUP will display which copies are OK and which have been canceled. If all drives were OK TURBOBACKUP issues a long high beep, if not then the error beep as described above is going to annoy you again. ABOUT VERIFY AND RETRIES ------------------------ TURBOBACKUP will not copy without verify, because we think that this is a senseless operation. TURBOBACKUP will only copy standard AmigaDOS floppy-disks. It will not copy disks with copy protection or errors on them! If TURBOBACKUP encounters an error it will make 4 retries and if not successful give you the chance to issue again four retries and again and... If any of these retries is successful TURBOBACKUP displays a message, draws an orange box around the cylinder and continues. These cylinders are OK! The orange box is only a reminder that there has been a problem, so that you can locate disks with 'weak' media. IF TURBOBACKUP encounters any errors that can not be solved by retries, you have to 'Abort' / 'Remove' this copy. Then use disksalv (Thanks Dave!) or copy single files to restore the data. TURBOBACKUP even verifies the gap between the last and first blocks on a track. If a very small hard error on the disk surface falls into the gap when writing to it, and the copy program does not detects this, the chance is great that you get an unrecoverable error when normal DOS routines try writing to this track. With TURBOBACKUP we managed to make this a very rare devil to occure. This also implies that TURBOBACKUP will reject more disks than other programs. But this is a small "drawback" compared to loosing valuable data on your workdisk! COMPATIBILITY ------------- TURBOBACKUP tries to be fully compatible with DOS. That means it will use step rates, precompensation etc. just like the DOS does. The copies will be identical, this means, that AmigaDOS will visit Guru-town if you put some these disks simultaneously in your drives! This problem will not occur at the time TURBOBACKUP is running or by leaving it. OTHER THINGS TO MENTION ----------------------- TURBOBACKUP will shut down the drivemotors if an error occurs and 10 seconds passed by. TURBOBACKUP will display a message when you try to quit and there are still some identically disks in the drives. TURBOBACKUP measures the speed of the drives in use and tries to accomodate to it as long as it is in an acceptable range. It will NOT test the source drive on write protect in the actual version. So YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE to make sure that no disks get damaged. By the way it is a very good habit always to set the write-protection on your disks to the ON position. This also helps to tackle the problems with viruses that came up the last months, because the chance to become infected disks gets smaller the more disks of you are write-protected. KNOWN BUGS AND PROBLEMS ----------------------- At some very rare moments, mostly when using too slow drives, TURBOBACKUP had a problem with cylinder 79. It will determine an error and it is not possible to get past it using 'Retry'. Then 'Abort' and 'Start' will make it work. Because this problem was not reproducible and so rare, we could not remove it. But there never were any bad disks as a result of such behavior. So we think nobody should be angry about it. The other known problem is not caused by TURBOBACKUP. When you use TURBOBACKUP in screen-mode in conjunction with ClickToFront the titlebar will disappear if you double-click the screen and you cannot drag the screen anymore. As far as we know this is a problem of intuition.