Date   : Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:17:16 +0100
From   : michael.firth@... (michael.firth@...)
Subject: New storage system suggestinons?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: 
> bbc-micro-bounces+michael.firth=bt.com@... 
> [mailto:bbc-micro-bounces+michael.firth=bt.com@...
> .uk] On Behalf Of Rob
> Sent: 14 October 2009 14:47
> To: BBC micro mailing list
> Subject: Re: [BBC-Micro] New storage system suggestinons?
> 
> One of my ongoing tasks is to image all my floppies, so I can use the
> likes of DFS/ADFS Explorer to sort out what's on them..  The vast
> majority of my discs are in ADFS format, simply because I dealt with a
> lot of 1K images, and DFS's 31 file limit is a bit of a limit !  So
> far, the easiest way I have found to do it is using the GoMMC to image
> each disc to file.  Then I can take the MMC card out, stick it in a
> laptop, and copy it up to a NAS..
> 
> I've got one of Mark's CF IDE beasties, which is great as a drive in
> itself, but won't really work for this particular task.
> 
Couldn't you use TreeCopy (or equivalent) to copy each ADFS disk to a directory 
on the CF card, then use the back utility that comes with the IDE stuff to
make a PC image of the CF card, and then use ADFS explorer to drag each floppy
back to a separate ADL disk image (if you need them separate)

I'm not sure how efficient the GoMMC PC access utilities are, so it may be
that this process ends up being slower than your one.

ADFS Explorer also doesn't seem to handle loading hard disk images with lots
of files on very well (at least on my PC), it spends a long time re-drawing
the file tree as it scans each directory.

The other option, which shouldn't be that hard, is to write a bit of BBC 
Basic or Machine code to create an "ADL" format file backup of an ADFS floppy,
then you would just end up with a collection of disk images on the CF, which
could then be extracted directly using ADFS Explorer.

Regards

Michael