Diamond Back 3 V3.11 Patch Release Date: July 10, 1994 This program will patch any Diamond Back 3 version 3.0x to version 3.10 To perform the patch you need the following things: 1) Copy DB3PATCH.PRG and DB311PAT.DAT to the same directory that DB3.PRG is located. 2) Run DB3PATCH.PRG 3) Enter your serial number and the requested word from the manual. 4) Click on Patch Note: If DB3.PRG is "squished" it must be "unsquished" before applying the patch. If you should experience any difficulty with the patch, you may obtain the upgrade by returning your original disk to: Oregon Research 16200 S.W. Pacific Hwy., Suite 162 Tigard, OR 97224 Thank you. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ---------------------------------------------- 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 ----------------------------------------- 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 --------------------------- 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" --------------------------- 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 -------------------------------------------------- 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.