Getting Your Backup...And Not Getting Your Backup

By Robert Wolff

When I first received my copy of Back Again/2 Personal Edition, I saw this as an opportunity to get one step closer to installing an HPFS partition on my machine (my old backup program is DOS-based, so it won't see HPFS partitions). From the packaging (the outer box was a CD jewel case, although the product ships on a 3.5" floppy), it looked like it required minimal documentation, namely a slim manual inside the cover.

It was an unpleasant surprise to find that there was no printed documentation for this product, although there was a READ.ME file roughly 8k in length. What was inside was a license agreement with an (IMHO) offensive condition. Most software license agreements contain a clause of the form BackAgain/2 Logo Cover GIF"by using this program, you agree to the terms of the license you agree to the terms of the license agreement". The license agreement for BA/2 states that "By opening this package you accept all the terms and conditions of this agreement." - since the text of the agreement is not visible until the package has been opened, they appear to expect users to accept the agreement before reading it. Also, except for the heading ("Back Again/2 Personal Edition Single User Software License Agreement"), all references to the product in the license agreement explicitly refer to the Professional Edition. Since software companies tend to be extremely careful with the wording of their license agreements in order to follow the terms of the 11th Commandment ("Thou Shalt Not Expose Thy Posterior", a.k.a. "CYA"), any glaring errors here are a poor sign so far as overall quality is concerned.

Installation had a few rough edges, including the lack of a help button to provide a brief explanation of the consequences of checking or leaving blank each of its check boxes, such as the changes it intended to make to my CONFIG.SYS file (one of my pet peeves is programs which change my system files without letting me know exactly what changes they want to make). Another (minor) gripe is that the disk was shipped with the write-protect tab in the read/write position. Original distribution disks should never be inserted in a machine while write-enabled, in order to avoid accidental infection - since disk duplication compainies can supply disks with no tab (permanently write-protected), there is no excuse for shipping software on writable media.

When I tried to use the program, the tape icon was missing (it was shown in the online help). Since capsule description on the back of the package states "Back Again/2 Professional is available for those requiring SCSI tape support", this implies that the Personal edition supports non-SCSI tape drives (I have a Colorado Jumbo 250 - a standard QIC-80 drive connected to the floppy controller). A search for "QIC" in the online help came up empty, and a search for "tape" only revealed references to SCSI tape drives. It appears that the help file for the Professional edition is shipped with the Personal edition, rather than one which has been edited to only show features which are available with this package.

According to the READ.ME file, help is available through 3 routes: a voice line, a BBS, and CompuServe. While I can understand the lack of an 800 number, the lack of an Internet ID for technical support is inexcusable since it restricts no-long-distance support to people with CompuServe IDs. When I got through to their tech line, I found that the Personal Edition only supports media with drive letters, and that the Professional Edition does not support floppy-interface tape drives. Apparently, unlike other backup software vendors (the backup program in PC Tools 7.x, and the one supplied with Windows NT, both support QIC-80 drives) Computer Data Strategies feels that the many users of QIC-80 and QIC-40 tape drives are not worth supporting. Since backing up to floppies is not an option (I have roughly 700M of disk space), I find this package to be of no use. If I had a Zip or Jazz drive (according to the technical support person, they are supported), I might have a different opinion, although the 2 examples of lack of attention to detail (the license agreement, and the help file) do not inspire confidence in the quality of the product.