Path: menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: sgberg@charon.bloomington.in.us (Stefan G. Berg) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Quarterback 6.0 Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.applications Date: 18 Jan 1994 18:17:40 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 255 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <2hh944$scp@menudo.uh.edu> Reply-To: sgberg@charon.bloomington.in.us (Stefan G. Berg) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: hard drive, backups, commercial PRODUCT NAME Quarterback version 6.0, with Schedule Pro [MODERATOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on Jan 20, 1994. The incorrect phrase "megabytes per second" was changed to "megabytes per minute" at the author's request. -Dan] BRIEF DESCRIPTION Quarterback 6.0 is a backup and archival program for Amiga computers, supporting backups to disk, tape (or other SCSI backup devices), and file. Included is a program to take some action at specified times, such as starting a backup automatically. COMPANY INFORMATION Company: Central Coast Software A division of New Horizons Software, Inc. Address: 206 Wild Basin Road, Suite 109 Austin, Texas 78746 USA Telephone: (512) 328-6650 E-Mail: 75300.1416@compuserve.com (James Bayless) LIST PRICE Retail price: $99.95 (US). Upgrade from Quarterback 5.0: $30.00 (US). Upgrade from Quarterback version older than 5.0: $40.00 (US). $5 ($10 outside the USA) for shipping and handling. SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE At least 512 KB RAM is required. SOFTWARE AmigaDOS 1.2 or higher. There is no mention about compatibility with AmigaDOS 3.0 and higher. COPY PROTECTION The first time you run Quarterback, it asks for your name and serial number. The program refuses to start up if an incorrect entry is made. This doesn't prevent other people from copying a correctly serialized Quarterback program, but it tags every Quarterback program with the original owner. After the user enters a name and serial number, the copy protection is invisible. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING Amiga 500 2 MB Chip RAM, 8 MB 16-Bit Fast RAM, 4 MB 32-Bit Fast RAM AmigaDOS 2.1 (Kickstart Version 37.175, Workbench Version 38.30) Progressive Peripherals 28 MHz 68040 Accelerator GVP Impact Series II A500-HD+ controller; attached devices: Quantum 525 LPS hard disk Tandberg TDC 3600 tape drive INSTALLATION Quarterback 6.0 comes with the Commodore Installer program to install it on your hard drive. This process just takes a few minutes and is very easily accomplished. The program can be run directly from the floppy disk if desired. REVIEW The backup program can be started on the Workbench screen or on its own screen. After an annoying copyright notice which takes a few seconds to disappear, a window appears listing all devices. The window also contains four buttons: "Backup", "Restore", "Enter", and "Back". Doing a backup on a properly set up system involves choosing the device to backup and then clicking on the "Backup" icon. One can also move deeper into the directory structure by using the "Enter" and "Back" icons or by double clicking on the devices. This permits the user to backup individual directories instead of a whole device. After choosing a backup device or directory, an Options window appears asking the user for specific backup options (this window can also be turned off). At this point, one can change the choice of backup medium to one of three options: floppy disk (up to four are supported), a SCSI device, or an AmigaDOS file. Quarterback automatically detected my Tandberg tape drive and set the SCSI ID correctly. On systems with multiple backup devices, one can also change the SCSI ID at this point. Except for the "backup to file" option, all backups are stored using a Quarterback specific format. It is therefore not possible to read in files from a Quarterback floppy disk under AmigaDOS. One therefore must also use Quarterback to restore a backup. The Options window also allows the user to choose between a complete or selective backup. By clicking the "MORE" button, one can open a second window containing even more options. Here it is possible to set the compression method (none, normal software compression, or hardware compression if supported by backup medium), use of archive flag, password protection, verify mode, and other items. Finally, it is possible to hide the Options window next time a backup is done. This is useful for users who never change the options and don't want to be hassled by this window. The Options window can still be opened using a menu item. Once the user is finished with the Options window, the selected device or directory is completely scanned. While this can theoretically be a time-consuming task, the time seemed to me to pass quickly. After the scan, the number of files and the total number of bytes is displayed. If selective backup was used, one can now individually select or unselect files or whole directories. Quarterback offers a large number of methods for selecting and unselecting files. One of them is the archive flag which is useful for incremental backup. I will not go into much detail here, except to say that many selection options exist. For a complete backup, the whole device or directory is automatically selected. On a backup to floppy an indicator informs the user of the number of floppies needed for the backup (compression is not taken into account, and a question mark after the number warns the user of this fact). A click on "OK" will start the backup. I have done backups to floppy and was fairly satisfied with the performance. On a two floppy drive system, disk writes and hard disk reads are done asynchronously (at the same time). With a fast CPU, compression will speed up the backup to floppy. On my brother's stock Amiga 2000, compression considerably slowed down the backup. Backups to a tape drive can be done synchronously (tape drive accesses and hard drive accesses occur one after another) or asynchronously. I was experiencing problems doing the backup asynchronously to my tape drive, since the quality of my SCSI cable is very poor. As a side note, I was also experiencing problems with two hard drives attached to my system (not only in Quarterback), so I hope this problem is unique to my setup. It is very difficult on an Amiga 500 to keep the SCSI cables short and noise-free. Backup speed to my tape drive is about 2.5 MB per minute without compression. When compression is enabled, that rate drops down to 1 MB per minute, despite my very fast CPU. I was somewhat disappointed by this fact. On already compressed data, the compression algorithm may in fact expand the data during a backup (similar to what happens when sending compressed data with MNP5-compressing modems). Quarterback can optionally display the compression ratio and backup speed at the end of a backup. At all times, it is possible to stop or pause the backup. Also it is possible to set various options using the menus. One important option for tape drive users will be the buffer options, in which one can increase the buffer size from the default 32 KB to something higher. In order to get reasonable performance out of my tape drive, I used a 1 MB buffer, which actually used 2 MB RAM (due to double buffering). Restoring a backup is similar to backing up. A catalog listing is kept with every backup (for safety reasons, one catalog at the front of the backup, and another at the end). Therefore, one will get a complete file listing when restoring from a backup. One can restore the whole backup or select certain files only. One nice feature is seen when restoring from floppy disks: only the needed disks have to be inserted. I know of some backup programs which require the user to go through all disks sequentially, even those that do not contain any of the desired files to restore. There are many other items in Quarterback which I will not describe in detail here, but mention only briefly. Through the use of Quarterback macros and the ARexx interface, it is possible for the more experienced user to make backups to tape automatically. CCS even wrote a small scheduling program,, Schedule Pro, which makes it very easy to start certain programs (like backups) at regular times. The tape drive support includes rewinding and erasing tapes as well as storing multiple backups (sessions) on a single tape. All of these points worked fine with my Tandberg drive. Quarterback can also backup onto multiple tapes if a single tape cannot hold the full contents of the backup. I have not tested this option. DOCUMENTATION The upgrade package from Quarterback 5.0 includes a 20-page supplement to the original Quarterback 5.0 manual. All additions are clearly described in there. As an expert user, I found all my questions answered in the manual. Still, I believe that the essential parts are written clearly enough to be understood by a less knowledgeable user. LIKES AND DISLIKES I like the user interface. Everything is easily accessible, and yet the screen is not cluttered up with unnecessary options. I had little trouble getting used to the interface. The compression ratio does not justify such long compression times. An implementation of the XPK compression package would be a good addition to Quarterback. That way, users can decide between a fast and less efficient algorithm, or a slow but more efficient algorithm. Despite my fast processor, the backup speed dropped from 2.5 MB per minute to 1 MB per minute when 16-bit compression was enabled. On my boot partition, the compression ratio was only 30%. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS An alternative to Quarterback is Ami-Back. I have never worked with Ami-Back, but I have heard only good things about it from other people. There are also some public domain backup programs available. I have not looked at any of them. BUGS In the few days in which I have worked with Quarterback 6.0, I have not found any bugs. This was a pleasant surprise, as Quarterback 5.0.4 was full of bugs and didn't even work reliably with my accelerator. VENDOR SUPPORT Except for ordering upgrades, I have not contacted the vendor. Central Coast Service seems to upload patches for their programs to the biz/patch directory on the Aminet ftp sites. At least they did so for Quarterback 5.0. WARRANTY There is no warranty on the product as far as I can see. CONCLUSIONS I would have ranked Quarterback 5.0 as an unusable product due to its bugs. Fortunately, those are gone from Quarterback 6.0 and I can only recommend it as a good backup solution. The user interface is well written. I give it 4 stars out of 5. Speed is the main reason why I wouldn't give the product 5 stars. COPYRIGHT NOTICE This review is freely distributable. You can reach me, the author of this review, via email at sgberg@charon.bloomington.in.us (Stefan G. Berg). ,-------------------------------------------------------, |Usenet sgberg@charon.bloomington.in.us Stefan G. Berg| |Internet sgberg@ucs.indiana.edu MIME // AMIGA | |Bitnet sgberg@indiana GE Mail s.berg5 \X/ w/ bms | `-------------------------------------------------------' --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews