Message-Id: Date: Thu, 30 Oct 1997 12:52:38 +0000 From: Matthias Paul To: opendos AT delorie DOT com, opendos-support AT delorie DOT com, paul-ma AT reze-1 DOT rz DOT rwth-aachen DOT de Subject: Re: ? Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Content-Disposition: inline Precedence: bulk On 97/10/30 11:43:22 someone wrote: >I found that the xcopy.exe command in opendos 7.02 >is completely unreliable. >I used the command: >xcopy c:\*.* e: /s /a /e >to copy all files in all subdirectories from the hard drive. >xcopy failed to do this. Of course, actually it must fail as your harddisk does contain more data than suitable for *one* Bernoulli cardridges... If the target medium gets full, XCOPY will display an error message. In this situation you *must not* exchange the medium, and press Retry, but you *have to* press Abort. Otherwise some of the directory info might not have been flushed out to the first medium, and the second medium might get mixed up by invalid references to it. OpenDOS tries its best to detect this situation (actually, it is more likely to ruin your disk with MS-DOS then with OpenDOS in this scenario), but the actual behaviour depends on your drivers loaded, especially when using FASTOPEN or NWCACHE (though both are very reliable when been used with care). If you have pressed Abort, and then restart XCOPY on the new medium, XCOPY will restart the procedure. > However there were not enough of them to have used 12 >20 meg bernoulli cartridges from a 212 mb hard drive. >What I found when checking cartridges was 12 exact copies of one >cartridge. See above. >I'm not even going to try the backup utility, I'm afraid what will happen >if restore screws up. I have used BACKUP/RESTORE in ancient times, and they did work very reliable. Actually, BACKUP/RESTORE are exactly what you need if you plan to backup a hugher medium on multiple smaller ones (but you should better switch to other backup solutions like streamers if you need to backup more than 200-300 MB). For your purpose a QIC-80+ floppy port streamer might be a good solution, or maybe a ZIP-100 drive. Also you could use PKZIP, ARJ, RAR or the like to better compress your data when backing up. These utilities have options to create volume files of exact the size of your cardridges, and therefore allow for easy backups on multiple media. For your purpose, RAR might be the best solution, since it has a build-in solid compression mode for increased compression, and optionally has a quite intuitive interactive menu mode (similar to NC design). Hope this could help a little, Matthias ------------------------------------------------------------ Matthias Paul eMail: Web: http://www.rhrz.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html