Due to a freak computing electrical accident whilst trying to replace the computerised injection system on his car with a home computer, Graham Mason has now become SPEC MAN. Part man and part computer, he now heads up the TECH SPEC team in S.U.

Well I've never heard such a load of old cobblers. Specman? I wasn't told about that. I thought that the idea of this article is to show what technical software packages are on offer. You know, the sort of things that are advertised in the back pages of S.U. Still there's nowt as daft as folk (and nothing's dafter than the barmy editor of this mag). Anyway, here we go.

BACK-UP UTILITIES

This month I'll be looking at two major back up utilities and we'll look at software produced by Lerm and Kobrahsoft. These two companies are always advertising their backup utilities, so for once lets forget the advertising claims and get down to the real nitty gritty. Each of the two utilities will be tested by trying to back up five popular Spectrum programs.

WHO BACKS BEST?

LERM produce a utility called Plus 3 Mate and Kobrahsoft produce DB2. Both claim to back-up highly protected disks as well as files plus mountains of other things So, armed with five of the latest titles I fired up Plus 3 Mate.

PLUS 3 MATE

The disk contains five programs: Boot, Clone, Backup, Cat and Editor.

Boot: This a program which saves itself to a disk as a autoloader file, "cat"ing the disk as it loads so allowing you to subsequently load a file using a single keypress.

Cat: Gives you a directory listing of the current disk showing start length and position of the file on the disk. Nice theory but once or twice "cat"ing a protected disk has caused an instant crash.

Backup: This very handy utility allows you to select any file on a disk and back it or them up to your target disk as well as format disks of your choice. Utilities like this are worth their weight in gold.

Clone: This program is designed to be enable you to backup commercial software for archive purposes it does this by analysing each track and sector and then attempting to duplicate this onto your destination disk. Well, out of five of the latest titles that I tryed, it's backed up four of them which is pretty good going. Just for the interest factor I even gave it a disk off my own PCW and it backed that up also proving to itself to be a pretty impressive utility.

Editor: This utility would have been fantastic, if only it scanned the disk for sector and track information. But it relies on a rather clumsy hit and miss affair of finding the sector "you" used or require, it also cannot look at protected files. As an 'Oh no frills" sector editor it does its job.

DB2

The Kobrahsoft disk strangely only has two programs on it, loads lightning fast and goes straight into the five challenge using the clone command.

Clone: Once again this option is really here to backup commercial software for archive purposes. Once again it does this by analysing the track and sector format. Sometimes it may take 20 or more seconds just to look at one track. Time again methinks for the five disk test. Would it manage the four again? No it didn't. In fact it backed up all five first time. Very impressive. And the clone command even has built in the option of saving the image of the disk to tape. This allows DB2 to reconstruct your disk at any time.

Backup: This again is a file copier, but the choice is to backup to disk or files to tape. At £2.99 a disk, this can prove to be pretty invaluable. Upon selecting your files by "S"elect (the disk does an autoCAT of inserted disks) the program loads as much information as is possible - 60k worth of data took just seven seconds to load and save including disk swaps - now that's what I call fast!

Format: This option allows you to format your disk as an Amstrad :system: c.p.u.: or data, but doesn't stop there. By answering the following on-screen prompts you can create your own unique formats.

Rename: The facility allows you to alter the names of any of the files on disk.

Cat: This is an extra program on the disk and cats all the files and allows you to alter their status i.e. Archived systems, etc, delete, undelete, file start, length and where it is on the disk. Non-standard disks can also be 'Cat'ted using this utility.

Sadly lacking from this package is an editor but it is only advertised as a backup utility. Kobrahsoft say that its dice-disk editor is designed to be the complement to its DB2 package.

BEST BUY?

Down to the nitty gritty of actually putting your hand in your pocket. Which one should you buy? Well, both live up to their claims and Lerms comes with a fantastic manual.

DB2 Kobrahsoft Price: £14.95

PLUS 3 MATE LERM Price: £12.99