Always keep a backup

[trixster]

I've spent quite a bit of time over the last two evenings tweaking my A1200 setup and installing and getting Shapeshifter running nicely. It's taken quite a few hours of work to put it in a position where I'm happy with it, so I thought I'd make a backup of my main system cf card first thing this morning.

Disaster.

Something must have happened to the card during the backup process because after using Win32 Disk Imager on win10 the Amiga refuses to boot the card again. At first I thought it was a hardware issue with the Idefix express - this is a great piece of kit but in my experience it's always been a little bit flakey and I don't entirely trust its reliability 100% having already had one go up in smoke.

Anyway, after much head scratching, swearing and chin scratching including trying with zero success to get winuae to boot the cf card or the dodgy backup img, I resigned myself to burning last month's backup to a different cf card. Thankfully this booted fine on the A1200 and my second 8gb storage drive (where thankfully all the Shapeshifter work has been saved!) works ok too, so it's not an Idefix or IDE channel issue.

So I'm now having to setup all the tweaks I made again to get my backup from last month back to where I finished off last night. I'm going to buy another cf card in case the original is faulty and unreliable for future use.

So, the lesson is.... ALWAYS keep a backup (although I'm sure most of you do!)

/TLDR

Make regular backups so you don't lose everything!

[Amon_RA]

CF cards are great, but I wonder how long they last and how reliable they are compared to a real hard-disk. Can a CF card handle the amount of read/write cycles required an Amiga?

[thomas]

How do you emulate a harddisk in Shapeshifter? Do you use a filedisk or a partition?

If you use a partition, be aware that Shapeshifter cannot go beyond the 4GB border. Which means that the partition must be inside the first 4GB of the harddrive. If it's outside, writing to the Shapeshifter partition destroys some of your Amiga data. This would explain your disaster.

[trixster]

Filedisk - one is cammy's 7.6.1 hardfile, the other is a 1gb hardfile with games on. Both of these sit on their own <4gb Amiga partition on the second 8gb cf card which is on the idefix's second channel. The problem was with my main Amiga cf card, not the one employed for storage and shapeshifter.

[idrougge]

At least back up your RDB if you're going to let Windows meddle with your cards. Your files were probably safe and sound.

[trixster]

Hadn't thought of that, you may well be right!