Backup Advice

[ChaosLord]

If u want to start fresh then the easiest thing for you to do is to buy yourself a new (used) SCSI hard drive and plug it in and use that.  And just keep the old hard drive exactly like it is in case you want to start experimenting with the toaster next year.

You need to buy a new hard drive anyway if you are going to back everything up with lha.  Yes you can make a backup with lha, but the backup needs someplace to write to.  Like another hard drive.

This also lets you get a drive of a decent size, like say 4GB or more.  120MB is really really tiny.  A single game can fill 120MB.

[ChaosLord]

Best bet would be to back up the whole 120MB drive to a CD-R if you can hook a SCSI CD burner to your Amiga.  MakeCD is some good free software.

If you are going to do that you must first lha the whole hard drive then burn the .lha file else everything gets wrecked.

I would make 1 .lha file for each partition of the hard drive.  If there is only 1 big partition then I would make 1 big .lha file.  Which would then get burned.

lha preserves file attributes.

CD-ROM discs ruin them by setting all files to READ-ONLY.

The next option would be to use a cable to connect your Amiga to a PC and use Amiga Explorer (google it) to copy the whole contents of the 120MB drive to the PC for backing up to CD / DVD / USB, etc.

He doesn't have to buy Amiga Explorer.

It is much faster and cheaper to use a PARnet cable and use the free software on the PC side that that guy wrote.  He has threads going on multiple forums.

[ChaosLord]

Can you look at one of those CD's you burned?

And do a list from the shell?
Just a list of some random dir that has some files in it.

And paste the list here for me?

When I did it all my files came up as
filename r-ed----

This means when you restore such a backup, tons of software won't run anymore.  I think you never restored any of these backups you made or you would have noticed the problem, as it is very annoying to have it happen.

[ChaosLord]

@rai-clan

Ok I guess I was just mixing up burning problems under windoze with burning stuff the Amiga Way(tm).  or something...

Maybe it matters what CDFS is used?

Which CDFS are you using, just for 100% complete information.  In case someone refers to this thread years from now.


I for sure have received various complaints in Emails from ppl who download my game from Aminet then unlha it on windoze (this trashes various filenames) then burn the extracted files to a CD-ROM which does even more filename trashing and also sets all files to R-E-.  Or at least they somehow ended up as all being WRITE-PROTECTED and/or Delete-Protected when they were copied over to their Amiga hard drive.  Maybe that part was due to whatever CDFS they used.
Then they run the game and can't understand why it doesn't work. :crazy: