Backup Advice

[mistermsk]

Hi All,

 I had an Amiga 1000 and 2000HD growing up. I sold my 2000HD to get money to buy a wedding ring. Anyway, I recently obtained a 2000HD. It had a Video Toaster in it with GVP G-Force 030/40 card and a 120 Meg Hard Drive. It also has 8 megs of ram. The NTSC motherboard was shot show I obtained a PAL motherboard. Anyway, I really only want to play games on the thing. My worry is that I might one day put the Video Toaster back in and play. First off, Can I just back LHA it program directory and back them up on another computer? Is there any other directories I need to back up?

I have Workbench Disks. I do not have a GVP G-Force disk or the Video Toaster disks (even know they are installed on the machine).

Basically, I want to start fresh. I assume I need to get the GVP G-Force disk(s) somewhere. Is there anything else I will need?

[Ral-Clan]

Hi don't throw out that NTSC motherboard.  I'm sure there are lots of people that would take it for the cost of shipping and might be able to revive it (heck, I might even give it a try depending on shipping).
As for the Toaster software and GVP software?  I suspect you will be able to find the GVP driver disks online here:

http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/gforce2030

As for the Toaster software...there are places you CAN find the installation disk. But it takes some hunting.

You can try to find all the individual toaster files and back them up, but you'll likely miss something.  It's way easier to do a fresh installation from the original disk if you can.

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.

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.

[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.

[Ral-Clan]

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

Why?  I've backed up my Amiga partition a LOT of times with MakeCD and restored my Amiga from this CD.  I simply copied the filesystem "on the fly" to the CD-R, of course if your machine is not fast enough to do this, MakeCD can also generate an ISO image before burning.

If it's a problem with file-name length, or Joliet naming conventions, then MakeCD has an option to use Amiga compatible filenames.

[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.

[Ral-Clan]

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.

Well, I have restored them many times. I've never had a problem.  The RWED flags are all enabled.  All directory structures (even deep ones) are preserved.

I've done this many times since about 2002 until today.

As per your request, I pulled an old backup CD-R I did in 2007. I "LIST"ed a directory on that disk. Here is a screenshot (click it to make it bigger):



As you can see, all the RWED permission flags are all enabled.

The only unusual thing I've noticed is that sometimes the file creation dates look wrong in the listing (both on the Amiga side and when the CD is viewed in Windows).  For instance, some drawers have the date "FUTURE" and others show a Dec-17-2012 date even when the disc was burned long before that.  But the files are always good and all directory structures are preserved.

Here is one where the dates look wierd:



I did this for about eight years while I owned a real hardware Amiga, then after 2008 when I switched to WinUAE I continue to back up my Amiga partitions to a CD-R this way.

To restore from one of these CDs is very easy, just copy the root directory to the Amiga partition you want the whole thing to be restored to.

As I said, I am using MakeCD.

[mechy]

Hi All,

 I had an Amiga 1000 and 2000HD growing up. I sold my 2000HD to get money to buy a wedding ring. Anyway, I recently obtained a 2000HD. It had a Video Toaster in it with GVP G-Force 030/40 card and a 120 Meg Hard Drive. It also has 8 megs of ram. The NTSC motherboard was shot show I obtained a PAL motherboard. Anyway, I really only want to play games on the thing. My worry is that I might one day put the Video Toaster back in and play. First off, Can I just back LHA it program directory and back them up on another computer? Is there any other directories I need to back up?

I have Workbench Disks. I do not have a GVP G-Force disk or the Video Toaster disks (even know they are installed on the machine).

Basically, I want to start fresh. I assume I need to get the GVP G-Force disk(s) somewhere. Is there anything else I will need?

The video toaster is ntsc only,so the pal motherboard may cause you some trouble since timing isnt right.

as they said above,backing up to cd is easy and works just fine with makecd.

a second hd would also work , just use " copy dh0: to dh1: all clone"  (no quotes)  in a shell for a exact backup.. dh0: is the source drive and dh1: is destination so change those to whatever they need to be.

the gvp install disk is here: http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/gforce2030

its not really needed though since the accelerator works out of the box and needs no additional software installed. you can use a workbench intall 3.1 disk,just edit the scsi device tooltype in hdtoolbox for gvpscsi.device.

[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:

[mistermsk]

Hi don't throw out that NTSC motherboard.  I'm sure there are lots of people that would take it for the cost of shipping and might be able to revive it (heck, I might even give it a try depending on shipping).

Thanks for the heads up. I plan to keep it as a spare. I am working on getting the battery acid off and removing the battery. I attached some images of what I am dealing with. After seeing some images on Google. It appears that this one is very sever. Almost as bad as the one on CBMFreaks. This is what I get for buying one on e-bay that it was good when it was put away. But I did get a 030/40 Mhz GVP out of it with 8 Megs of Fast Ram, Video Toaster, and 120 Meg Hard Drive out of the deal.


In regards to backing up.

First, I like to thank you ral-clan for the driver location for the GVP G-Force 030. This was one of my biggest fears.

I do not have a CD Burner (or a CD drive) for that matter in the Amiga 2000HD. I do have a few null modems cables so I was figuring attaching the amiga to a PC and using a term program.

In regards to one big LHA, I can't really do that. I have 35 Megs free on the 120 Meg drive. So, I got to figure I am going to have to do it bunches. However, after going through it. I found the directories that have the Amiga Toasters extras (stuff the previous only left on). I'll back them up, such as the animations, so I can test them out on a new install. Since I saw that a fresh install is probably the way to go for the toaster software, I will probably obtain the disks from e-bay or another source. This is a first generation video toaster (not a 2.0 or a 4000 one). So, I hope the software won't be 'that many' disks.

I hear you about the LHA and keeping file properties. I will deferentially use LHA for archiving the backups.

Thank you all for the responses. This gets me thinking about getting an External SCSI CD drive.