MorphOS External USB Drive Backup Guide

From MorphOS Library

Author: Jason Grenier

Starting Out

First things first, you need an external drive. 500GB to 1TB drives are now very inexpensive, so go out and buy one.

You will need to format the drive in file-system format that MorphOS understands. I recommend FAT32 as I have been told that external drives formatted as MorphOS SFS can cause serious problems. It is also helpful to use Fat32 as almost all operating systems have support for it.

If you are using Windows XP to format the drive, you will need a large capacity formatting tool as the built in tools will not allow you to format a large drive with partitions larger than 4GB.

A good tool is guiformat.exe available here: http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?guiformat.htm [1]

You can, of course, also use MorphOS to format the drive, but this is not something I will cover in this tutorial.

Fat32 and Amiga Protection Bits

Fat32 cannot store Amiga file protection bits. A solution to this problem is to create an SFS Disk Image on the the Fat32 partition.

First you need to create a disk image file. You can do this quite easily with Kryptos. We will use Kryptos to create an image, but not use it's encryption feature.

Please note that you can use Kryptos to make disk image based backups, however, Kryptos makes encrypted disk images which may be more than what you need for backup purposes. Encrypted images are not covered by this tutorial.

  1. Open SYS:Applications/Kryptos
  2. Select a Unit and click on Create New...
  3. Save your image file somewhere on the Fat32 drive you formatted earlier by clicking on the file gadget. Give it an appropriate name, click ok, and click on Next.
  4. Make the volume an appropriate size. You can make it large enough for one backup, or large enough for several. You may want to consider making it 3800MB so it will safely fit on a DVD.
  5. The cryptographic options don't matter. Click next.
  6. Enter any password. We won't be using it anyway, so it doesn't matter what it is. Click next.
  7. The file-system page doesn't matter. Click Next.
  8. Wiggle the mouse, click Create.
  9. Wait while the image is created. It could take quite a while depending on its size. Click OK.
  10. Back in the Kryptos main window, click Eject to eject your newly created image.
  11. Quit Kryptos.

Making The Disk Image Usable As A Regular Disk

  1. Open SYS:Tools/FileImageCtrl
  2. Click a unit to highlight it, then click Insert...
  3. Select the disk image you created earlier, and click OK.
  4. Make sure Read/Write is selected in the window.
  5. Close FileImageCtrl
  6. Open SYS:Tools/HDConfig
  7. Under FILE IMAGE you should see your disk. It will likely appear as a red disk icon. Click to the right of its icon.
  8. Select One partition from the selection window, unless you wan't more, but you're on your own if you go that route.
  9. Click to the right of the image drive icon again. This time you will have to give the partition a name. Call it IMAGE0 or whatever you want. Just make sure it isn't named the same as other partitions! Click OK.
  10. Click Save... under the drive image icon.
  11. Close HDConfig
  12. Open SYS:Tools/Mounter
  13. Select fileimage.device from the top pane
  14. Highlight IMAGE0 (or whatever you named your image) in the bottom pane.
  15. Select MorphOS SFS from the FileSystem: gadget.
  16. Click Mount, or Mount on Boot if you want the image to always be mounted when you insert the image using SYS:Tools/FileImageCtrl
  17. Close Mounter
  18. On your desktop (Ambient) select Utilities->Format Disk from the main menu (right click menu)
  19. Select IMAGE0 (or whatever you named your image), give it a label, and click Quick Format... You may uncheck any of the options.
  20. Close the format window.
  21. Your new disk image will show up on the desktop, or in My MorhpOS

Backing Up To Disk Images

You may now copy clone your drive to the image.

  1. Open a new shell (Action-N from ambient).
  2. Input the following in a new command shell (Action-n from Ambient) copy clone all sys:#? IMAGE0:
  3. Wait for the copy to finish.
  4. Repeat for each drive you want to backup.

CONGRATULATIONS! You now have perfect backups of your MorphOS drives!

Restoring From Disk Image Backups

  1. Open SYS:Tools/FileImageCtrl
  2. Select a Unit
  3. Click Insert...
  4. Select your backup image
  5. Close FileImageCtrl
  6. Open SYS:Tools/Mounter
  7. Select fileimage.device from the top pane
  8. Highlight IMAGE0 (or whatever you named your image) in the bottom pane.
  9. Select MorphOS SFS from the FileSystem: gadget.
  10. Click Mount, or Mount on Boot if you want the image to always be mounted when you start MorphOS
  11. Close Mounter
  12. You may now copy all or some of the files from IMAGE0: to wherever you want.
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