Diamond Back 3 V3.11
Release Date: July 10, 1994
To ensure that you get the most out of your investment, please
carefully read your manual. Although Diamond Back 3 has been
designed for ease of use, the many features become clearer after
reading the manual. It is extremely important that you fill out
your owners registration card and promptly return it to Oregon
Research in North America or HiSoft in Europe. This is required
for you to obtain product technical support.
New Feature for Hard Disk to Hard Disk Backups
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If you choose to have your hard disk to hard disk backups placed
in a folder, you can now have different source drives backed up to
seperate folders on the destination drive. To do this, enter a ? as
the first letter of the destination folder name. During the backup,
the ? will be replaced by the source drive letter.
Example: If you are backing up files on drives C, D, and E and you
want them to go into seperate folders on the destination drive then enter
?_DRIVE
as the destination folder in the Advanced Backup Dialog and files from
drive C will be backed up to a folder called C_DRIVE on drive F, files
from drive D will be backed up to a folder called D_DRIVE on drive F and
files from drive E will be backed up to a folder called E_DRIVE on
drive F.
New SCSI Tape Option
--------------------
The Advanced Backup options now contains an option for users of
older SCSI tape drives to turn the "Immediate Command Completion"
feature off for the LOAD/UNLOAD and REWIND SCSI Tape commands.
This feature allows the tape drive to complete load/unload and
rewind commands without the user having to wait for it to actually
finish before returning to the program or desktop.
In general most users will have this option ON. However, some older
tape drives do not properly communicate that that are busy rewinding
or loading. If you experience problems with Rewind commands returning
"No Sense" codes, long delays, or irratic behavior in other commands,
then turning the immediate command completion option off will solve
this problem. Users of these drives may also experience "No Sense"
codes when their tape is full rather than the normal
"End of Medium" message.
Keyboard scrolling of Select Files Window
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You may now use the up and down arrow keys to scroll the Select Files
window. Up Arrow or Down Arrow scrolls the display up or down one file,
Shift-Up Arrow or Shift-Down Arrow moves the display up or down one page.
If you are currently editing selection masks, the up and down arrow keys
move you around the edit box. Click outside the edit box to end the edit
and you can use the arrow keys to scroll the list again.
Sorting File Selection Tree
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Sorting in the selection screens has been added to both backup and restore.
You can now sort the file selection screen by name, date, size, and type.
"Rubberband File Selection"
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You can now select and de-select groups of files in the file selection
screen by clicking and holding the mouse button then dragging the mouse
until the drawn rectangle encloses all the desired files. Normal dragging
selects files, dragging with the shift key down de-selects the files.
A note to SCSI Tape Drive users using ICD software
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If you use ICD hard disk driver software you must turn the write
cache off to perform or restore SCSI Tape Backups. If DB3 is reading
from or writing to tape when ICD's driver flushes it's write cache,
then ICD's bus access will lock the system.
A note to SCSI Tape Drive users
-------------------------------
Every effort has been made to make Diamond Back 3 support all
models of SCSI Tape drives. During development, most problems
encountered were individual hardware problems often related to cabling
and noise issues. Tape drives are especially sensitive to Cable
Quality, Cable Length, and SCSI termination.
A few recommendations if you experience problems:
1) Minimize your cable length. Never use a 3' cable when 18" will do.
2) Buy High Quality doubly shielded cables. The money you save on
cheap cables will be spent on aspirin for the headaches they cause.
3) Look at the environment, reduce the ambiant noise the SCSI cable
travels through. Place as far away from power cords as possible.
4) Purchase a powered active terminator. These actively regulate the
line voltage on problem SCSI chains and are often the only thing
that will allow problem SCSI chains to operate reliably.
5) Try another host adapter. Some drives do not perform well when
attached to a particular host adapter. Changing it often resolves
the problem.
Selection Masks
---------------
The manual states there are 9 available selection masks. This is true
in any resolution 640x480 or greater(TT Medium, Falcon, etc.). ST High
and medium resolutions 640x400 or 640x200 only have 5 masks available.
EXTRAS are now Compressed
-------------------------
Due to space limitations on the master disk, the Diamond Format and
Diamond Find and compressed in the file EXTRAS.LZH If you do not have
access to a program that will uncompress LZH files, then please contact
us and we will be happy to send you uncompressed versions of the
utility files.
Extra Folders for TOS
----------------------
Just because you have a TOS past 1.4 does not mean that you are
immune to operating system memory pool problems. Although the
limits have been extended, they have not been eliminated and you can
still run into problems. Disk Utility programs stress the operating
system memory pool more than other programs by accessing many more
folders in a single session than would be accessed during normal use.
If you experience problems (even if you don't) we recommend you run
FOLDRXXX.PRG with several hundred folders or add additional folders
through your hard disk driver. This recommendation is regardless of
the version of TOS that you have.
A Note to Data Diet Users
-------------------------
If you are using Data Diet you must either turn Data Diet OFF or
select FIND NEXT FILE: ORIGINAL SIZE before running Diamond Back. This
is required for Data Diet to return the correct "undietized" file size
from the operating system call used to determine a file's size.
If you want your backups to be normal files, then you must specify
FIND NEXT FILE: ORIGINAL SIZE before Data Diet will return the correct
file size. If you turn Data Diet off, then your backups will contain
Dietized files.
Are you in possession of stolen merchandise?
--------------------------------------------
Diamond Back 3 is commercial software. If you have not paid for this
software then you are reading this illegally. Please reconsider your
actions. You are literally stealing food from my childrens mouths. In
addition to being illegal and wrong to steal, you will be personally
responsible for the death of the Atari ST and small software companies
like Oregon Research.
Think about it.