AMIGA GUARDIAN 1.0

Amiga Guardian is a snapshot and recovery utility exclusively for the Commodore Amiga — think System Restore on Windows or Time Machine on the Mac, finally on the machine that deserved it first.

WHAT IT DOES

Guardian takes a snapshot of the files you tell it to look after, and puts them back exactly as they were — a single file, a drawer, or an entire drive.

The point is to make trying things safe. Install a program, edit your Startup-Sequence, let an installer do whatever installers do — and if it goes wrong, go back to the snapshot and the machine is as it was.

Snapshots — the first copies everything, later ones only look at what changed, so they're fast

Compare — see exactly what an install or an experiment actually touched

Put back — one file, one drawer, or everything, with the full list of changes and a disk-space check shown before a single byte is written

Full drive protection — rolling back also deletes what was added since, so the drive ends up genuinely as it was

Journaled restore — interrupt one with Ctrl-C and Guardian offers to finish it or undo it. It will not start a restore it can't complete

KNOWN GOOD — mark a snapshot and Guardian will refuse to delete it. Permissions and attributes preserved and restored properly

Rescue disk — a bootable floppy carrying Guardian and your settings, so you can roll a drive back from outside it when it won't boot. It never formats anything; you supply the formatted blank

GUI and CLI in one binary — full GadTools window from Workbench, commands from a Shell

WHAT IT WON'T PRETEND TO BE

It is not a backup program. The copies live on your own hardware, so it protects you from mistakes, not from a drive dying. Keep real backups too. And it helps when a drive still mounts but the software on it is broken — that's the common case, and the one it's built for.

REQUIREMENTS

AmigaOS 2.04 (Kickstart 37) or later

Any 68000 or better — no FPU, no accelerator needed

About 600K free RAM while running (582K measured; 546K from the rescue floppy)

A stack of 8192 bytes

A hard drive, for the Vault where copies are kept

Tested on Workbench 2.04 - Workbench 3.2.3, on FFS and PFS3, across 450+ checks.

THE RULE IT WAS BUILT ON

Guardian must never make your situation worse.

Every part of it was written against that sentence. Wherever the choice was between doing something clever and being able to say honestly what had happened, the honest one won.

Written for real Amigas and emulated ones.