Hello Murray,

14 Sep 99 16:10, Murray Lesser wrote to Kenneth Abrams:

 ML>     I think you are confusing "backup" with "archive."

I'm not confusing anything, I just have a broader definition of a backup than
you apparently do, and chose (once) to use the only OS/2 native tools I had
available to accomplish a goal.

 ML>   An "archive" is a record of some past system
 ML> content that I wished to save for possible later use.  I would never

And this was a record of a small portion of my system content that I wished to 
save for possible later use.

 ML> consider using a backup utility to produce an archive record, and I
 ML> wonder what ever gave you the idea to try, especially since BACKUP
 ML> does not compress records.

It does, however, *span* disks, which *no* other native OS/2 utility I had at
the time could do. In hindsight, I could clearly see that I *should* have used 
an old DOS tool such as ARJ to accomplish my goal, but I foolishly chose to
use what I had. Seemed sensible enough at the time, given that I had
previously done precisely the same thing using DOS's backup/restore, only
*without* the same problems. Compression certainly wasn't a factor, since the
files in question were already compressed (zip files).

 ML> or (at most) as ZIP or ARC files with a copy of the corresponding
 ML> UNZIP (or UNARC) file on the same diskette.  It doesn't matter what
 ML> directory they came from.

So, tell me, how do *you* squeeze a 3-4M ZIP file onto a 1.44M floppy, eh?

 ML>     Since the backups are records of current contents of my hard
 ML> drive, there is no problem in knowing which directory the original was
 ML> stored on, since it still exists.

Unless, of course, you foolishly wipe out an entire directory and then wish to 
"restore" it. My experience with my one time use was that until *I* remembered 
what the original path was and specified it, all I got was errors that seemed
to imply the backup was bad.


Kenneth (kabrams@us.hsanet.net)

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