Ok. Here's the deal. A friend and I were attempting to help staff members at a local church to handle some of their periodic computer tasks like updating member information in a database, retrieve mailing lists, etc. Their system was set up by a man who recently passed away. Now my friend and I are Windows geeks but not Amiga geeks. Perhaps after this, we don't even qualify as geeks any more. Feel free to laugh at our expense (we deserve it). But please give us a hand if you are able.
One of the tasks was very simple...format a floppy. WooHoo, I thought. This is an easy one. We located a formating utility and perused the options. I thought that what was listed was a set of possible floppy disk sizes DH0 was 880K (which size I had never heard of), DH1 was 120M, and DH2 was 120M. There were others but I forget now what they were named.
I thought that since there was no such thing (according to me) as an 880K floppy that it must have been referring to a 720K disk. Likewise, I figured 120M was supposed to be 1.2M but was just missing the period and was a bit off from the standard 1.44 IBM floppy. Yes, I know. It sounds dumb to us now too. But it seemed logical at the moment. We opted to format DH2. When we noted that the HD activity light was blinking instead of the floppy, we knew we were morons and hit Cancel or Stop.
Now, upon reboot, we noticed that several icons that were previously on the desktop (workbench?) were now missing. One was named Main. Not surprisingly the previously pleased church staff commented that this and that was missing and would no longer function.
There are regular backups that are done...weekly. But since we don't know squat about Amiga, we really aren't sure if only the data is archived or if the data and the applications are backed up. However, we did notice that an app called Calculator was within this backup folder (drawer?). To us, many of the other file names seem very generic...like census, payroll, etc. But now having seen calculator, we are wondering (and hoping) that these are entire directories or even just pre-named archives that include the applications themselves.
Another glimmer of hope is that there is another Amiga on site that has a duplicate application set. The only difference is the data generated or stored with them. So between the two computers, we do have all the needed applications and the data in backup form.
All that said (and humbly confessed) we do not know where to go from here and are quite gun shy after botching such a simple operation as formatting a floppy. If it were a Windows machine, I would reinstall the software and import all the backup data (all database, text, and created art). But we're really struggling with some of the terminology. For instance we looked for anything called RESTORE or RECOVER.
Any recommendations on our next steps...outside of skipping town and admitting defeat, of course.
Is there a standard restore type application that would handle any existing backups? Or would those be application specific?
How about transferring apps from one Amiga to the other? Is that as simple as the old DOS (pre-Windows Registry days) where you just copy directories onto a floppy and then copy over the whole directories?
Any help is greatly appreciated. (and laughter is completely understood)
Sincerely,
James Senick (not my real name to protect the rep I once enjoyed)
