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From: cpc@vaxine.UUCP (Chris Cullen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: WARNING! FASTBACK may corrupt your hard disk!
Message-ID: <703@vaxine.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 30-Nov-87 09:22:04 EST
Article-I.D.: vaxine.703
Posted: Mon Nov 30 09:22:04 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 5-Dec-87 15:12:36 EST
Organization: Automatix Inc.,  Billerica, MA
Lines: 55
Keywords: hard disk, lost files, trojan horse

I am the victim of a bad situation that I want to broadcast, in the hopes
that others do not also get burned.

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
while, having used IBM's BACKUP facility once only.  Two and a half hours
required to make a backup, no recovery from finding a bad floppy sector
when you're halfway through, etc., etc.  It's a completely inadequate piece
of trash.  A tape backup was a little more money than I wanted to spend, so
I tried out the $89 (PC Connection) FASTBACK product.

The product itself actually seems pretty nifty.  I was sceptical that ANY
backup onto floppies could be anything but painful, but... only twenty minutes
for me to back up (I thought... more later) about 22 meg of stuff, with
only one floppy drive.  Wow!  Finally, data security!

That sigh of relief lasted only a couple of days.  The first sign of trouble
was when using my word processor (Microsoft Word) hung the machine.  REALLY
hung it, like power-down time, folks (I don't have a hardware reset switch).
I reinstalled it from my original product floppies, and it worked fine again.

Well, I get right on the phone (toll call to tech support, of course) to
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
READS the source disk.  Wrong.  It updates all the archive bits, and in my
case, shuffles the FAT (it has lots of files open at the same time).

It is more than a little bit infuriating to buy a product solely to guarantee
data security, and having the use of it be the one thing which trashes the
disk! It will take me a long time to survey and estimate the damage, but
by a cursory inspection I'd say around 10% of everything is munged.  I tried
restoring from the backup (the verify option did say the files were different),
however even the restored version of the one program I tried still hung.

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
or advertisements is this mentioned.  The guy I talked to was incredibly
blase about my problem; not the least apologetic.  Sure, I'll get a refund.
BIG DEAL!

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


-- 
Chris Cullen                UUCP: {ucbvax!allegra,decvax}!encore!vaxine!cpc
Automatix, Inc.             Phone: 617-667-7900 x2066
1000 Technology Park Dr.
Billerica, Mass. 01821