Happy New Year everyone! I’ve got big plans for my Amiga projects in 2019, but thought I’d start off the New Year with a blog post on a not-particularly “exciting” topic, but an important one nonetheless: backups. As I am experimenting more with my X5000 and Amiga OS 4.1, I’ve been getting particularly “twitchy” that I didn’t have a solid backup/restore plan in place, particularly as some of my experiments will invariably go wrong and I’ll need a way to roll back my changes to a known-good state. I spent a few days researching and implementing a backup strategy that’s ideal for my needs and hopefully there will be something of use to other Amiga owners too.
Developing and implementing a solid back-up strategy is not just something that’s important for computers running popular platforms like Windows, Linux, or macOS – there’s countless people who do all kinds of more or less important work on smaller platforms like Amiga OS to whom proper back-ups are just as important. This article is a great resource on how to get started with back-ups for Amiga OS 4.
Good old xfsdump & xfsrestore under Irix >= 6.2 is still nice 🙂
From my personal perspective, it’s kinda funny that Amiga is more alive (and it [b]is[/b] alive! http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-28483217 😀 ) than IRIX – I remember an article from the early 1990s in the Polish “Commodore & Amiga” magazine salivating over SGI machines, as if they were the future (and not the hated PCs 😛 )
When you fiddle with experimental OS as a means of learning, backups become you’re besties! Incredible how quickly you can bring an OS to its knees with the words “maybe this will work.. “