Got any niggly annoyances with FastBackup?

[cshandley]

If anyone has any niggly annoyances (i.e. small problems) with FastBackup, could they mention them here? I might be motivated to do something about them!

Stuff that I've already done (but not yet released) :

* No-longer wrongly detects that a hard reset has occured on 5mx, after the battery has been changed. I've only had one complaint about this, hence not released it yet.

* Can now close buggy apps which don't respond to system close requests, by faking a Ctrl-E key press. e.g. iBattery now closes properly.

* Should no-longer try to close Alarm Plus. If anyone has any other suggestions for apps which can't be closed, please mention them!

* Now uses UIDs to recognise Email, Contacts & System, so it should work more reliably on non-English systems. Although I've never had any complains regarding this, so probably the problem didn't exist!

[cshandley]

More stuff that I've done (but not yet released) :

* When saying No to deleting a file (when Restoring), it offers to avoid all deletions automatically.

* Cancelling the deletion of a file (when Restoring) also no-longer reports a deletion failure, but instead indicates that it was cancelled.

[cshandley]

FastBackup will sport a much improved GUI. You'll no-longer have to put-up with an kludgy dialog as the main interface, as it's been replaced with menus, a toolbar & stuff. FastBackup now looks like it could be shareware or commercial IMHO :)

I've also removed the ability for others to write their own GUIs for FastBackup, since no-one has used this facility. All the Backup.opo code has gone into FastBackup.app, which saves a precious LOADM slot. However, using some *serious* Black Magic, I have been able to implement a Backup.opo which 'emulates' the previous behaviour, so that existing macros/etc should still work fine :)


However, this has required some SERIOUS changes under the hood, which may have introduced some bugs (although it now seems to work reliably at my end). So I'll definitely be making one or more Bleeding Edge releases, in the hope that people can stress-test it, before I make an official release.

[PlutoPants]

Thanks Chris,
I've been away from the forum for a while but will happily test for you. I look forward to seeing the new GUI, although I'd quite got used to the quirkiness of the old one.
George

[cshandley]

I've now released a new Beta with these changes:
http://www.freepoc.org/yabbse/index.php?board=5;action=display;threadid=132

Please email me (or post here) your thoughts on these changes :-)

[wanman]

Just installed it on my 7Book and when run I get ERROR: Procedure not found Error in FASTBACKUP\RUNI previously had fastbackup installed and it is on my D: drive.

[cshandley]

For anyone having problems with the latest FastBackup Beta (or with TubeRoute), please read the last post in this thread:
http://www.freepoc.org/yabbse/index.php?board=5;action=display;threadid=132;star t=msg777

[wanman]

Sorry Chris but I have downloaded the latest beta of tuberoute and when I click on the .sis file all I get is an error message confirming "Not Found". As already confirmed, Fastbackup bombs out with above error and Tuberoute just will not launch at all. I have tried removing tube route and reinstalling with the new .sis but getting the same message :(

[wanman]

Fixed problem with help from Chris. I had to remove all tuberoute and fastbackup files completely including associated OPM files. After doing this I installed Tuberoute and Fastbackup again and they both went in ok. I reinstated my backed up .ini files and both apps working great.

Cheers for help Chris.

[cshandley]

I don't know WHY you had that problem. EPOC got confused somehow. I can't see how it was specifically related to FastBackup or TubeRoute, but obviously one of the files used by both of them was causing problems for EPOC.

[cshandley]

Going by the latest comments elsewhere, the current Beta seems to be working very well. It'd be much appreciated if anyone else could give it a test.

[cshandley]

I've now released a new Beta with these changes:
http://www.freepoc.org/yabbse/index.php?board=5;action=display;threadid=132;star t=30

[ohsix]

Installed the new beta. Slight problem. I've been using Macro5 to run FB. The beta version has changed the key stroke to run both profiles (my C &D drives backed up to my netBook's E drive) from P to Ctrl+P. I changed my macro to the new key strokes.

But, it now opens a window which FB's menu identifies as Ctrl+Shift+P. Manual Ctrl+P does open the correct profiles window, but the macro doesn't. Therefore the backuip doesn't run when I use Macro5.

Has anyone found this to be? Also, does anyone know why it is happening and how I can correct it?

Keith

[ohsix]

Chris Handley solved the problem for me. All I had to do was change the 'p' from upper case to lower case, i.e., from Ctrl+P to ctrl+p. The app was seeing Ctrl+P as Ctrl+Shift+P.

Keith

[Stargazer]

Would it be possible for FastBackup to save backups as a zip file? This can give significant savings when backing up to CF due to slack space (I was able to shrink a backup taking 20MB down to about 300KB). The zip algorithm is open source (http://www.info-zip.org/) so hopefully this shouldn't be too difficult. ;)

[cshandley]

Would it be possible for FastBackup to save backups as a zip file? This can give significant savings when backing up to CF due to slack space (I was able to shrink a backup taking 20MB down to about 300KB).
It would be possible, but it might no-longer live-up to it's name: *Fast*Backup !

ZIP or any other good compression scheme typically halves the size of files (i.e. a 2:1 ratio), and never more than about 4 times smaller (for easily compressed data like plain text). If you really did get 20MB down to 0.3MB (a 67:1 ratio), then your "data" files didn't actually contain any data at all! Or perhaps your ZIP program is broken.

Either way, I simply don't think that the effort to implement compression would be worth it, what with huge CF cards being so cheap these days. And worse, you would *need* FastBackup to access your backup files, which could cause problems, particularly if you don't have a working Psion...

[Stargazer]

If you really did get 20MB down to 0.3MB (a 67:1 ratio), then your "data" files didn't actually contain any data at all! Or perhaps your ZIP program is broken.Neither - the main space-waster is slack space (small files still require a full cluster which could be 32KB on a large CF card, and there tends to be lots of those on C: :)) so having everything in a single file (even without any compression) leads to significant savings. FastBackup could go down this route and provide such savings without compromising speed.

Zip is an open format (with plenty of free extractors for every platform) so using it should still leave backups accessible on non-Psion machines.

[fazrihan]

I am sorry loyal fans...

I have given up today- on 31st AUGUST 2005 I have decided to abandon Psion.

I love Psion but I lack technical support in Singapore.

I have a faulty Netbook and 5MX but it is just too expensive to get them repaired.

I will still stick with my Treo 600. perhaps I may buy an iBook in future.

Cheers with tears
Fazrihan
Singapore
:o
:(

[donkeyontheedge]

Would it be possible for FastBackup to save backups as a zip file? This can give significant savings when backing up to CF due to slack space (I was able to shrink a backup taking 20MB down to about 300KB). The zip algorithm is open source (http://www.info-zip.org/) so hopefully this shouldn't be too difficult. ;)

The problem with this will be the speed of the netBook processor. I remember playing with ZIP files on it when I first got it, and it was painfully slow compared to even a old PC.

If the program has to open a zip file, unzip each file to check for updates, then rezip it, it will probably be on a par with PsiWin for speed.

To save space, you could always zip the backup to a PC from the CF card and delete the CF copy. Could be dangerous though if you were away from the PC and needed a restore. With CF card prices so low, you'd be far better off getting a larger CF card.

One other point - all my apps (bar EDU) are installed onto the CF card, not the C: drive. This means I only ever have about 4Mb of data on C: for FB to backup. A complete backup or restore takes under 2 minutes :)

John

[Stargazer]

If the program has to open a zip file, unzip each file to check for updates, then rezip it, it will probably be on a par with PsiWin for speed.That would be an inefficient way of checking whether a file needed to be backed up true, but it shouldn't be necessary (an index of file modification/backup dates could be held separately to determine what needed backing up).

However just combining all backup data into a single file, without any compression, would avoid the slack space issue (which worsens when you move to larger CF cards and cluster sizes). They would need splitting again to access backups on PCs but there are a number of free utilities for this task.

[cshandley]

(My previous reply appears to have been lost, when PDAStreet temporarily went down. If this reply seems terse, sorry, but I haven't got the patience to write it all again.)

so having everything in a single file (even without any compression) leads to significant savings
Sorry, but that would require me to implement my own filing system (like FAT), which is a huge undertaking - and so won't happen.

While I could use an OPX for ZIP support, I am not keen on using 3rd-party OPXs in an Open Source program. Plus, making ZIP support optional would be VERY hard, on par with adding FTP support (which I have avoided for similar reasons). So again, it won't happen.

HOWEVER, the good news is that SecureDrive already implements a filing-system within a file. So your problems will be solved if you buy it, create a virtual disk with a small cluster size (to minimise slack), and then backup to it.