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From: del@pilchuck.Data-IO.COM (Erik Lindberg)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: WARNING! FASTBACK may corrupt your brain! (B.S.)
Message-ID: <769@pilchuck.Data-IO.COM>
Date: Tue, 8-Dec-87 19:11:58 EST
Article-I.D.: pilchuck.769
Posted: Tue Dec  8 19:11:58 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 13-Dec-87 16:37:32 EST
References: <703@vaxine.UUCP>
Reply-To: del@pilchuck.Data-IO.COM (Erik Lindberg)
Organization: Data I/O Corporation; Redmond, WA
Lines: 64
Keywords: hard disk, lost files, trojan horse

I have seen many people slander Fastback for various reasons. To date I
am not sure why they assume Fifth Generation systems is at fault. I have
seen Fastback in use on dozens (literally > 20) of systems. I have seen
problems, but they have *always* been attributed to the machine or
installation, *never* to Fastback.

In article <703@vaxine.UUCP> cpc@vaxine.UUCP (Chris Cullen) writes:
>I have a 30-meg Seagate st238 RLL hard drive for my vanilla IBM PC, with an
>Adaptec ACB-2070A RLL controller card.  I had gone backup-less for quite a

I am running exactly this configuration on one of my machines (oops, not
vanilla IBM, it is a clone XT). On another machine I am running a Maxtor
1140 which formats to 196Meg using the 2070a. One of the partitions on
the drive is 134Megabytes, which means a non-standard parsittion using
non-standard sector sizes. Fastback has no trouble with either configuration.
Just to make sure I wasn't fooling myself, before I wrote this message I
restored the 30 Meg hard drive from scratch, and ran CRC's on 5 megabytes
of files and found them to all be intact.

>Fifth Generation systems, the makers.  Didn't take long.  And I quote:
>"Yeah, we don't know anyone who's gotten RLL's to work with anything but
>a Western Digital controller".  You would think that a backup program only

Personally, I would say that people don't tend to call F.G. just to say:
"Hey, I just installed this with an ACB2070A and guess what? It works!"
The Western Digital RLL controllers far outnumber Adaptec simply because
almost every drive/controller combo, and virtually every hardcard is
delivered with a WD controller. The fact they haven't heard of anyone that
got it to work says nothing. He didn't say "No, this doesn't work with it".

>As far as I'm concerned, Fastback is the ultimate trojan horse.  I'm sure
>it was not intentional.  However, criminal negligence is certainly indicated.
>It's obvious from the brief phone conversation that they KNOW that using
>Fastback on some varieties of hardware (what OTHER configurations are also
>problems?) will corrupt the source data.  NOWHERE in their documentation

What can I say about this statement, except that in my experience F.G. is a
responsible company that listens to it's customers and has a genuine concern
that their product work correctly. What I wonder is what your attitude was
when you talked with F.G. such that they were unresponsive to your problem.

You said you had a vanilla IBM PC. What revision? As I mentioned in the first
line of this article, I *have* seen situations where Fastback had problems.
In all but one case the problem was traceable to the BIOS, and replacing the
BIOS with a decent BIOS cured the problem. The one other problem was a flakey
floppy disk controller, and replacement effected a cure. I suggest you get
a BIOS upgrade to an XT BIOS from IBM, or purchase a Phoenix BIOS (out of
the computer shopper). Then try Fastback again. Of course, I doubt that you
will pay any attention to this.

>I can only recommend that you
>        A- NOT BUY FASTBACK
>        B- TELL EVERYONE YOU KNOW NOT TO BUY FASTBACK
>        C- QUESTION YOUR PRESENT BACKUP METHOD VERY CAREFULLY
>

I can only recommend that you
	A- BUY FASTBACK
	B- IF YOU HAVE TROUBLES, QUESTION YOUR MACHINE FIRST
	C- ALWAYS QUESTION YOUR PRESENT BACKUP METHOD VERY CAREFULLY

-- 
del (Erik Lindberg) 
uw-beaver!tikal!pilchuck!del