Week of September 1st, 1995 (950901)

People asked about Ami-File-Safe, and I got it. Here is the information
on the product, and here are the prices.

I am now taking ORDERs for it until Friday, September 8th, at which time
I will place a bulk order with Fourth Level Developments in the UK.

Ami-File-Safe User..................................................$59.95
Ami-File-Safe Pro..................................................$119.95

Pricing in Canadian dollars.
Any applicable shipping and taxes must be added.
As usual, I will ship anywhere in the world.

PS: I have some extra SuperBuster -11's. They are priced at $99 each.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
            A M I - F I L E - S A F E   I N F O R M A T I O N
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Amiga Filing Systems
--------------------
The  standard AmigaDos filesystem (OFS) has always had problems.  There are
two primary difficulties:

(i). It is slow (on large disks very slow!).
(ii) The filing system has problems if the system crashes whilst writing
to disk.

Commodore  tried to improve the performance of their filesystem a number of
times.   Workbench  2.0  added  the  Fast  File System (FFS), and now, with
Workbench  3.1,  we  have  the  Fast  File  System  with  directory caching
(FFS-DC).   This  makes  directory  scan  faster,  but  writing to disk and
directory operations, like delete and rename, are slower than ever.


The New de facto standard
-------------------------
These  problems  have  been  addressed  by  Ami-FileSafe along with a large
number  of  other  inefficiencies to produce a new de facto standard filing
system for your Amiga.

The improvements over FFS in both speed and data security are substantial.

Ami-FileSafe (AFS) was originally developed by Michiel Pelt and released as
shareware  under  the  name PFS (Professional File System).  The need for a
more  sophisticated and comprehensive version soon became apparent and this
led  to  collaboration  between Michiel Pelt and Fourth Level Developments,
who  are  renowned  for  their  work  on  Computer  filing  systems  and on
magneto-optical  drives  with  very  large  directory  trees.  Ami-FileSafe
Version 2.1 is the result of that collaboration.

There  were a number of bugs present in the shareware version which has now
been  withdrawn  from  circulation.   Fourth Level Developments and Michiel
Pelt  worked  together  to  identify  and  eradicate  all known bugs and to
introduce  new  features.   This resulted in Ami-FileSafe Version 1.0 which
was  subjected  to exhaustive beta testing.  This created a stable platform
for further development to commercial standards.

Fourth  Level  Developments have a policy of not shipping software until it
has  fully matured.  Ami-Filesafe V1.0 was therefore not released.  However
the  decision was taken to add a significant number of features which would
make  AFS  operate reliably in all environments and provide a filing system
capable  of being accepted as the new de facto standard for the amiga.  The
result is AFS V2.1


Ami-FileSafe V2.1 Pro - Basic Features
--------------------------------------
AFS V2.1 Pro includes:

  Notification
  Hard and soft links
  Support for large disk drives (Upto 4GB)
  Auto-Booting
  Add Buffers
  Sophisticated Cache Routines
  Max transfer and DMA masking
  Very Large Directory Support
  Setowner 
  A New FreeBlock Management System
  International Support
  MultiUser FileSystem Support
  On the fly AFS to FFS conversion.


Hundreds  of  minor fixes and improvements have been made which amount to a
major rewrite of the filing system.
 

Ami-FileSafe V2.1 User
----------------------
Ami-FileSafe User is a budget version of AFS and has the follow limitations:-

- It may only be used on ONE HARD DRIVE of upto 650MB.

- It does not include the MultiUser FileSystem version of AFS.

It does however include the FFS to AFS converter. 


Disksalv support
----------------
Ami-FileSafe is supported in Dave Haynie`s latest version of DiskSalv 
(release date July/Aug 1995) which will be distributed by
Fourth Level Developments.


Floppy/Harddisk
---------------
Included  are a version for floppy and a version for harddisk.  It is up to
you  to  use one of them or both.  They don't interfere with each other and
can be used simultaneously on the same machine.


Future Releases and UpDates
---------------------------
Version 2.2 will include comprehensive file undelete features (release date
August 1995) and support for partitions up to 9G.

Registered  users  of  2.1  will  be entitled to this upgrade free of 
charge.

Version  3.00, due in the Autumn of 1995, will provide a significant number
of  additional  features  including  memory  protection for both the filing
system  cache  and  for  programmes written to take advantage of AFS.  This
will fulfill the long expressed requirements of serious amiga users.

The  plans  for  Version  4.00  include multi-platform and operating system
support,   together   with  variable  read/write  access  modes  to  enable
developers  select  the  mode which best supports the requirements of their
application.   Detailed  information  for  developers is due for release in
August/September 1995.


Performance
-----------
Ami-FileSafe has the following performance characteristics:

High performance:

  read and write operations: faster by a factor of 2
  directoryscan: 10-20 times FFS, 3 times FFS-DC 
  delete/rename/protect etc: 10-20 times faster

Other features:

  full AmigaDos compatibility
  better fault tolerance
  parallel access almost without performance loss
  disks NEVER get invalidated

This  distribution  includes  a floppy version and a harddisk version.  The
floppy  version is fully compatible with the previous shareware versions of
PFS.  It can be used for both double and high density disks.

The  harddisk  version supports all hard disks of all brands and sizes.  It
is  RDB  installable  and  supports  booting.   It  is  NOT compatible with
harddisk shareware versions of PFS.


Benchmarks
----------
Test             FFS      AFS      Units

DirScan          409      1780     Files/Second
Create           227      1073     K/Second
Read             244      1363     K/Second

The DirScan, Create and Read tests were done with DiskSpeed V4.2

SeekTest (x100)  53.6     4.4      Seconds

SeekTest was done using a custom program (Source code available on request).
It performs the following sequence:

Seek Start of file
Write 4 Bytes
Seek to End of file
Write 4 Bytes
Repeat


Reviews
-------
A review of Ami-FileSafe is available from Aminet and comp.sys.amiga.reviews.
If you would like this review send to you then please ask.


System Requirements
-------------------
Ami-FileSafe will work on any Amiga with kickstart 2.04 or higher. 
Versions for both 68000 and 68020+ based systems are provided.


Support
-------
A  new mailing list has been setup for AFS users and is quite busy.

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