A SUITE OF DISK<->FILE TRANSFER/BACKUP UTILITIES.

	IN OFFERING THIS SOFTWARE THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL RESPONSIBILITY
FROM ANY CONSEQUENCES ARISING FROM THEIR USAGE.

				 W. Alan B. Evans | Email: wabe@ukc.ac.uk
						

 			SECTMAN.PRG - THE SECTOR MANAGER.

	This useful utility allows the transfer of specified sectors (512bytes)
from DISK <--> MEMORY BUFFER or from FILE <--> MEMORY BUFFER. Rwabs WRITE
Verify may be turned OFF for quicker writing and, you are prompted whether you
wish to use hard/soft read/write options in writing to disk. One one occassion
HARD writing a VIRUS-INFECTED BOOTSECTOR with the SECTOR MANAGER cured the
latter - wheras if a soft write was attempted the virus was alerted to foil
the attempted transfer and persue its evil way (of not allowing access to the
disk contents in that particular case)!.

	SECTMAN must have enough free RAM to hold all the sectors asked for
in one contiguous buffer. Thus multiple copies of entire disks can be quickly
made to preformatted floppies with the SAME FAT structure for example. Indeed
the copies could be written to files also and large disks can be split up into
portions - each portion stored on a named file. HDQBUR automates this for Hard
Disk Backups (see next Item).


		HDQBUR.PRG - HARD-DISK QUICK BACK-UP AND RESTORE.

	This utility utilises similar TECHNIQUES to the SECTOR MANAGER to
quickly back up a hard disk partition onto big files on floppies. It assumes
you have formatted disks to 820k capacity (using DCFORMAT for example) and
will sequentially copy 1620 contiguous sectors to 810k files on each floppy
and label them C_BACKUP.A, C_BACKUP.B etc. if one is backing harddisk C:\ say.
The files' datestamp of course tells you when you last backed and if the disks
are accidentally inputted in wrong order - you are alerted and prompted with
relevant questions. Disk writes are very fast as the write VERIFY is turned
OFF. In my experience file write errors are rare - I have yet to experience
one! - but after restoring a partition, it would be wise to run a File System
Checker such as FSCK by Jorg Lohse to check its integrity. Typically a 10 Meg
Partition takes about 12 mins to back and about the same time to restore and
13 disks are required.

	Despite its name, HDQBUR is also suitable for backing up the contents
of huge ramdisks. We have a 2 Mbyte "rdy" Ramdisk loaded with all the system
files required by the Helios Operating System for a 21 Transputer Polyhedron
(or Atari Transputer Workstation) which we regularly back in this manner (onto
3 floppies).


		DFT.PRG  -   THE DISK-FILE TRANSFERER.

	This is similar to SECTMAN in concept EXCEPT that it is designed to
shift FILE<-->FILE, DISK--->FILE or FILE-->DISK or DISK<-->DISK but WITHOUT
requiring enough FREE RAM to hold all transfer bytes simultaneously in memory.
If FREE RAM is short, DFT will effect the transfer sensibly in multiple stages
much as Moshe Braner's FLEXCOPY or the DISKCOPY option of DCFORMAT will do.
However in copying from DISKS - DFT will not attempt to copy the BOOTSECTOR
(sector 0) which is protected anyway on some ramdisks e.g. Mark Williams' RDY
ramdisks. Thus DFT can succeed whereas other utilities fail to transfer the
contents of an "rdy" ramdisk to a similarly formatted disk - this usually
means configuring the "rdy" ramdisk to have a floppy-like FAT structure e.g 

setenv FATSIZE 12;setenv FSIZE 5;setenv ROOT 7;setenv CMD MAKE
rdy DISK=H SIZE=811 FILE=rdh811.prg

would create a floppy-like ramdisk H:\ with the same capacity as an 820k disk
formatted with DCFORMAT as the file rdh811.prg. The size 811kbytes is not
critical - so long as there is enough space and the FAT STRUCTURES are
identical. DFT copies disks from sector 1 upwards to a user-specified higher
limit which should be high enough to encompass all diskcontents but need not
copy the entire sector set of the disk. Write Verify can be chosen to be ON or
OFF. DFT thus enables very quick backup copies of RDY ramdisk contents to disk.
Beware however the "default" values of FATSIZE[16] and FSIZE[chosen to depend
on disk SIZE - but usually 3 sectors for ramdisks of about 800k] which unless
overrided (as above), means there is no hope of making a "FLEXCOPY-LIKE"
transfer to floppy.

	DFT distinguishes files from DISKS by the case of the first letter
typed - lower case implies a file wheras DISK A:\ (say) must be entered in
UPPER CASE i.e. A (not a). In transfers involving DISKS, whole sectors are
copied but for file to file transfers the EXACT number of bytes in the file
is copied so making an exact replica of original file. (i.e. it emulates cp).

	If, in copying to floppy DISK A:\ or B:\, DFT finds there is enough
RAM to effect the transfer in one stage - it will offer multiple copies of the
ENTIRE buffer - much as DCFORMAT will.


COMPILATION NOTES

	DFT and HDQBUR are quite tiny programs - thanks to Sozobon C's
remarkable "sys\minimum.h". SECTMAN makes use of higher level i/o and thus
needed a full-blooded "stdio.h". It was compiled with Mark Williams C
followed by packing with PFXPAK (after STRIP.PRG and removing symbol table
with RSYM.PRG).

                                                Alan Evans, 
                                                University of Kent,
                                                Canterbury,
                                                Kent, CT2 7NR, UK.
                                                ( Email: wabe@ukc.ac.uk )