#FILESAFE FILES MANUAL#
#FILESAFE FILES SOFTWARE#

“Instant Directory Listings” claims the cover of the manual. Over to speed now, AmiFileSafe’s other big claim. No matter what I did I couldn’t make it complain, including a complete power down and disconnection of cabling. On the data security side of things, I reckon it’s safe to say that this is exceptionally good but maybe the real word to describe it is bulletproof. No data had been lost! Unbelievable, and a possible scenario for those with an external disk farm. Being suspicious, I ran “diff” on the files to report any differences.

After a second or two, my 3MB file has been copied and the disk is valid. Aha! Gotcha! Replug the SCSI cable and the light starts flickering again. Unplug the SCSI cable whilst writing data and up pops a requester saying Write Error. Group delete files and reset? Nowt wrong. Close eyes, copy large file and reset half way through. AFS’s claim of improved parallel access certainly seems to be founded and the seemingly endless thrashing that occurred on my machine when ToolManager and EGS battled for bandwidth pretty much became negligible.

Once in place and with data reinstalled, I was glad to see that everything still worked and that my machine definitely booted faster. Due to the nature of the product, your disks need to be reformatted after installing the new filesystem onto them but you’ll already have a recent backup of your data, won’t you? One should have been supplied with your system. You’ll need HDToolBox to follow the manual’s instructions but RDPrep can be used to do the same job.

#FILESAFE FILES MANUAL#

The first hurdle that I suspected was that installation would be a pain, but thankfully the manual is excellent so people who have no experience of this sort of thing will be fine. In the commercial domain this is a big weakness of the Amiga – I speak from experience! A deadline and a file which became corrupted upon exiting an editor can leave even the strongest a gibbering wreck.ĪmiFileSafe’s main claims are to never become invalidated and also to be nippier too, which does sound too good to be true. The bad news is occasionally it can’t sort itself out at which point it’s time to start praying that some extra utility can recover your files… This can take an inordinate amount of time and still fail. If you reset your Amiga whilst writing to a disk you’ll know about it when you boot again: the disk thrashes around trying to re-validate itself. The Amiga has used FastFileSystem for the past few years which has its faults, including speed and fault tolerance.

#FILESAFE FILES SOFTWARE#

However, Fourth Level Developments have now released Ami-FileSafe with the proud claim that it’s the NEW de facto standard for the Amiga.įirst off, a brief explanation of what a file system is: a bit of software that sits in the system and maps files onto a disk or suitable medium, servicing requests for data. (Editor’s note: this was written in August 1995.Â Since then, a lot has happened – notably AFS has morphed into PFS, and SFS is hugely popular…Â But this is from back in the day and is presented as-is)Įxciting! Interesting! Two words that really can’t be used to describe filing systems on the Amiga.

Filesafe files