Can anyone suggest a good backup program?

[jumpship]

Hi all,

I was wondering if there is anyone out there who knows of some hard drive backup software that can backup a partition to a file?

Bascially I would like to backup my workbench partition every now and then, but be able to restore it and have it run as if nothing has happened.

I have checked on Aminet but there are just so many! Does anyone have some experiance with one?

Cheers!

JS

[SilvrDrgn]

I backup my A4000T monthly to tape using Diavolo Pro 2000.  It has some sort of partition backup mode, too, but that might be for some other proprietary type (can't remember).  I also do other online backups ... see below.

If that's not an option, then do you have two or more hard drives?  I have three in my system, and all three of them have a full copy of my Workbench partition.  All of them are bootable in case the one that I primarily use fails.  The copies are updated nightly with the very simple to use "mirror" program from Aminet.  Here is its Aminet entry:

mirror.lha         util/cli    28K  95 Mirror drives, homepages, etc.. (v1.4)

I have it being run automatically at night from the program scheduler called EZCron, also available on Aminet.  Doing a mirroring routine like this involves some extra playing around with partition icons showing up on the Workbench.  Duplicates tend to show up anywhere they want on the screen.  So, I make separate copies of the "Disk.info" files first, then put them back on each partition after the mirror is complete.  This keeps the icons from moving around.

If the above sounds complicated and you still just want a "one file backup", then you could still use EZCron to start up a script automatically at night.  That script would use your favorite archiving program (like LHA, LZX, ZIP, etc...) to compress all the files of your Workbench into the single destination file.  Doing it at night with EZCron would require no intervention on your part once it's set up.

[Rassilon]

Try Abackup on Aminet. The latest version is freeware, and enables you to backup partitions.

:-)

Rassilon

[Billsey]

Well, I have a CD-R/RW drive, so I use a DOS script and MakeCD in conjunction with a couple of dedicated partitions to backup up my system onto a CD-R. Each partition gets its own entry in the root directory of the CD-R. Of the dedicated partitions, one is for the DOS script to create the CD layout, and the other is for creating the CD Image file to be burned to CD.

Hi,

This one is easy. QUARTERBACK, is what you need, it will backup to anything you want it to and you can have it to automaticly backup your partition over night. There is a quarterback suit up for auction on ebay at the moment, it might be worth a look.

Dave

[MikesterBrau]

I have used Quarterback, Amiback, Mr. Backup, and Diavolo 2000 and would submit that the I use Quarterback the most as it is VERY reliable and easy to use but I am transitioning to Diavolo due to it's modern implementation, advanced features and best hope for future support and improvement.    Well that is my long winded 2 cents worth.  My 4000T is down for now but hope to be back in the Amiga game soon.   :-D   Oh yeah, several legal giveaways of Quarterback Tools exist via Amiga Mags and legal demo versions.  

[theTAO]

I have ABackup, but normally use the "Backup Files & Dirs" option, and also have a fairly small hard drive.  If you have very large partitions or wish to backup multiple partitions at once, keep in mind that most Amiga backup software (ABackup included) will likely not support 64-bit arithmetic for Partition backups.  A practical example: in ABackup, if the total size of the partitions exceeds, err, 2^31, ABackup reports negative numbers. :-(  Likely not a reliable way to go.

Todd

[pVC]

I have used Updatecopy command to make backup workbench partition to other hd. It just copies the files which have changed since the last backup, so it won't take many seconds to make the backup. I have set to Magellan's usermenu "updatecopy FROM dh0: TO dh1:Backup/ ALL FORCE CLONE SMARTINFO".

Nowadays I'm making backups to DAT too with Diavolo pro 2000. It has nice scheduler which makes backups automatically for example once a week.

Then there was some little program, which made image of the entire partition, but I don't remember now it's name... parter or something. I used it once when I got filesystem corrupted and wanted to make image file before trying to fix the partition. I think it worked only for max 2G partitions.