16 May 2001 John Bijnens is a CAM/CAM engineer in the KHLim - Dep. IWT which is some kind of technical university in Belgium. He gives training in Pro/E and also writes CNC postprocessors (all development is done on OS/2.) If you have a comment about the content
of this article, please feel free to vent in the OS/2 eZine discussion forums.
|
|
Back Again/2000 - A Backup Solution for OS/2
Some time ago I had a serious disk crash on my OS/2 development PC. I needed several weeks to recover from it. This was the start of my search for a good backup solution. I had several requirements for it :
still actively developed
cross platform (available for Windows NT and for OS/2)
restore possible by booting from a floppy
support for several types of backup media including network disks, zip drives.
After a search on the Internet I came up with Back Again/2. In the following article I'll briefly discuss Back Again/2000 WorkStation which is the successor of Back Again/2.
|
|||
InstallationThe installation of the software is started by executing setup.exe from the CD. It creates a folder on your desktop which gives you easy access to the program, the documentation and logs and predefined backup sets.If you want to use Back Again/2000 on Warp Server for e-Business then you have to apply fixpack 1 before you try to install it. If you don't, the icons within the Back Again folder will disappear after you reboot your server. UsageThere are two ways to perform a backup :
Manual backupThere are two ways to start a manual backup:
Starting with the iconBack Again/2000 presents itself with a very nicely organized dialog window.
Clicking on the 'Backup' tab on the notebook gives you access to wizards that make it very easy for you to quickly backup/restore your data using existing backup sets or to create your own backup sets. The picture below lets you see the different backup sets in the process of making a backup.
If you want to create your own backup set you have two options : you can use the wizards or you can manually select files/directories. There are 4 types of backup possible :
full : this makes a backup of all the specified files and resets the archive flag of the individual files which is set by OS/2 whenever a file is changed.
Besides the type of backup you can also specify whether you want full/light compression or no compression at all. The wizards only allow you to create a backup set that contain a whole partition. This is not always practical. Sometimes you only want to backup e.g. your project data. To achieve this you must click on the backup button
There are numerous options for you to explore. You can specify patterns so that e.g. only *.c files are backed up (include patterns) or that all files except *.c are backed up (exclude patterns), you can specify the device you want to backup to (zip drives, DAT tapes, network drives, and more), do you want the tape to be ejected after backup completion, etc.
One very special option is the one that lets you specify your own programs/script that must be run before the backup is made or after the backup is completed or when an error occurs. This option can be found when you select the menu option Set - User exits.
When everything is defined you can save this all as your own backup set by selecting the menu option File - Save. The backup set that you have now created can be used by the backup wizard that was discussed at the beginning of this article.
-ir C:\* -ir D:\* : backs up all files on drives C: and D: and recurses through subdirectories.
The only thing that was a little bit disappointing for me is that I couldn't find out how to use the clback command to perform a backup when you don't have the graphic layer of PMShell available e.g. when you have booted from floppies as clback always wants to open a status window on the desktop. This can come in handy when you want to perform a backup and want to make sure that no system files are locked and thus are excluded from backup. This last thing seems to be no problem for Back Again as I've found out it backs up all system files (ini files, DLL's, ...) whether they are in use or not.
The commands clrest (to do a restore of your backup) and cltape (to control the tape device to rewind, eject, retension, ... the tape) can be used when booted from floppies.
If this option is not available you've probably forgotten to install it. If you have a performed a standard installation of your OS/2 system this is not installed by default.
If you want to add open the System Setup folder and then the Install/Remove folder. Now start Selective Install and click next until you have reached the page OS/2 Setup and Installation. Mark the checkbox Optional System Utilities and press the More button beside it. Now mark the checkbox Create Utility Diskettes and proceed the installation.
When you have created the three Utility Diskettes you can start the program Disaster Recovery Diskettes. This will place the software to restore your backups on the utility diskettes.
You can now boot OS/2 from the utility diskettes and perform a restore by using the command clrest.
| |||||
|