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CASE HISTORY # RESTORE - Conclusion
by The Disk Doctor
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Copyright (C) 1988, the Disk Doctor.
First published in the Rochester (PC)^3 News:
Picture City PC Programming Club
PO BOX 20342
Rochester, NY 14602
The Disk Doctor may be contacted at this
address, or via CIS [73147,414].
This material may be reproduced for internal
use by other not-for-profit groups, provided
this copyright notice is included.
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9:30am
I had just asked S. whether she had
formatted her hard disk yesterday.
"No. Of course not. That would erase
everything, wouldn't it?"
"Oh, okay." I was a little surprised.
"It's just that I noticed that this
\WORDSTAR directory was created only
yesterday, so I assumed that..."
"She looked at my screen. How can you
tell that? The dates on these files are
all 2 or 3 years old."
"I don't look at the file dates, I look at
the dot and double-dot..."
"Geez, don't start talking to me in Morse
Code."
"I'm sorry. Here look," I pointed at the
screen. "The first two entries of a sub-
directory, dot and double-dot, contain
information about the directory tree.
Looking at the date on these first 2
entries, tells me when this directory was
created. I was trying to determine
whether you had reformatted recently, but
of course, that overlooks a more obvious
explanation."
"Which is?"
"When you stopped using the Wordstar
program last year, you deleted it off your
hard disk." I quickly called up DEBUG to
look at the first sector of one of the
Wordstar files. "Yesterday you needed to
restore a file, so you re-created a
\WORDSTAR directory."
"Well that's exactly what happened, but I
don't see how that has any bearing on this
problem?"
"Oh, but it does, S. The BACKUP file
stores a file header containing the path
name of the directory where the file came
from. RESTORE will only restore a file to
a directory with the same name. By
looking at the file header with DEBUG, I
can see that the last time you used
WordStar, the directory was named \WS.
Now watch this."
I typed 'RESTORE A: C:\*.WS /S'. The
disk drive came to life, and one by one
the list of filenames filled the screen:
\WS\NCR1.WS...
\WS\ADAMS.WS...
\WS\TFGBI.WS...
S. looked puzzled. "But where are all the
files going? I don't have any directory
called '\WS'. "
"One nice feature of the RESTORE command:
it creates the directory if necessary.
There, we're done. Now I can copy the
document files into the \WORDSTAR
directory where you have the program
loaded, and you'll be all set."
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[P.S. The BACKUP command in DOS 3.3 uses
a completely different and incompatible
format from earlier versions of DOS.]
NOTE: This is a dramatization of an
actual case history. I purposely
exaggerated the problems S. experienced,
to better illustrate the idiosyncrasies of
the RESTORE command.
