Re: IIgs files from PC

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

CUTblakeney@home.com (Jeff Blakeney) wrote:

>Phoenyx <quazar@dcnet2000.com> wrote:
>
>>I've heard some of the stories too, but I don't put as much faith
>>in them. As a tech, I find that many problems are started and or
>>compounded by user error and often blamed on hardware/software
>>faults to protect the users pride. As long as you practice safe
>>computing, you will find the HFS to be just as reliable as most
>>other disk formats.
>
>It should be impossible for a user, under normal operating conditions,
>to corrupt files on their hard drive as long as there is no hardware
>or software problems.  They can run into problems if they are doing
>low level block editting, which isn't normal operating, or they have
>bad hardware or buggy software.
>
>Hardware problems can cause corrupted files on disk regardless of what
>operating system you are using and bad hardware is usually quite
>obvious.
>
>Software problems are specific to an operating system, though.
>
>If someone can use a single hard drive partitioned into both ProDOS
>and HFS volumes and doesn't have any problems with his ProDOS
>partitions but does have problems with his HFS partitions then it is a
>safe bet that their hardware is fine.

I have both ProDOS and HFS partitions and actually, the only
time I had a file system problem, it was ProDOS not HFS that
generated problems.  I practiced safe computing and backed
up my data.  I used Zip disks.  Because the HFS partitions
were large, I just copied the files to Zip disks.  But I figured
since ProDOS partitions were so small, I could cram several
together using Archiver compressed volume backup.

My smaller hard drive crashed.

I thought I had a complete backup.  The HFS partition was
fully restored thanks to file by file backup.  But Archiver put
together a non-working backup of my ProDOS partition.  It
seems that the data had been scrambled.

I believe, based on my own experiences, that the major HFS
bug has been corrected with the patch.  If there are other
HFS bugs, I have not experienced them.  In a user survery,
it is important to record both positive data and negative data.
It is my belief that the other so called HFS problems are
really poor hard drive practices such as not backup up
data or restarting the computer while the drive is being
accessed.  Such things will kill ProDOS as well as HFS
partitions but on a ProDOS partition, there are utilities to
fix damage.  But as long as you keep backups, all should
be fine.

Just don't use Archiver compressed volume backups.