08/1997
Path: news.uh.edu!barrett From: teler@cs.huji.ac.il (Eyal Teler) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: UnDelete 1.02 Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.misc Date: 16 Aug 1994 23:25:39 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 133 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <32rhtj$810@masala.cc.uh.edu> Reply-To: teler@cs.huji.ac.il (Eyal Teler) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: disk, file recovery, public domain Originator: barrett@karazm.math.uh.edu PRODUCT NAME UnDelete v1.02 [MODERATOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on August 17, 1994. Search for the text "[UPDATE:" to find updated information. -Dan] BRIEF DESCRIPTION A very fast undelete program for single files. [UPDATE: The program is available on the Aminet ftp sites in the file /pub/aminet/disk/salv/UnDelete.lzh.] AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: ASWare Address: t.a.v. Ekke Verheul Postbus 2521 3000 CM Rotterdam The Netherlands LIST PRICE Public domain. SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS None that I know of. It was developed on an AmigaDOS 2.04 machine and works fine on my AmigaDOS 1.3 A500. COPY PROTECTION None. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING Amiga 500, 2MB Fast RAM, 1MB Chip RAM A590 with 100MB Fujitsu SCSI hard drive Kickstart 1.2, Workbench 1.3, ARP INSTALLATION The archive contains an Installer script. However, I did the simple thing and just copied the command to C: (which is what the Installer does). REVIEW Undelete is a small (15K) CLI program that lets you undo the effects of a Delete command. If you've deleted the file 'myfile', just enter 'undelete myfile', and it will reappear. You can also undelete empty directories this way. I was quite amazed by the speed of this program. Undeleting is almost as fast as deleting. This easily makes this program an invaluable tool for recovering files you deleted by mistake. It's miles better than using a disk recovery tool which scans the disk for deleted files. Note that you can't undelete files in RAM:, which is quite logical. Also, don't try to undelete a file you didn't delete. UnDelete apparently tries to scan the disk. Still, it's always possible to stop it with Ctrl-C. DOCUMENTATION It explains how to use the command and gives a list of error messages with their meaning. I didn't need more than this. LIKES I love the speed and simplicity. DISLIKES AND SUGGESTIONS I don't like what the program does when you undelete a file you didn't delete. I'd prefer a simple message that no such file was deleted. [MODERATOR'S NOTE: I suspect this is not possible to do. If the program does not scan the whole disk, how can it be 100% sure that the file was not deleted? Someone please correct me if I am wrong. - Dan] COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS There are several programs which can undelete files, but they usually work by scanning the disk, which takes a lot of time. This is the first program I've seen which can simply undelete a file. BUGS You can't undelete a file in a partition with an odd number of sectors. It's a problem shared by other disk utilities (such as FixDisk), and is apparently caused by a wrong calculation of the root block (if I remember the net discussion correctly). VENDOR SUPPORT I haven't contacted the author. No e-mail address, sadly. WARRANTY Hey, it's a PD program. CONCLUSIONS This is a must have. I won't give UnDelete full marks simply because it has a bug which prevents me from using it on 2 of my 3 partitions. COPYRIGHT NOTICE Copyright 1994 Eyal Teler. All rights reversed (hey, that's what happens after writing a reverse compiler). --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews