Amiga archiving

I've had great luck in the past few weeks using a new tool called 'tsgui' that can be found on Aminet and the usual Amiga-related sites. It writes an Amiga volume as an HDF file, the format now supported under emulators such as WinUAE. My remaining Amigas (an A2000/040 and an A4000/030) always had Ethernet cards with TCP/IP and NFS. Using the freeware SOSS NFS server on my PC, I can see the PC's hard disk on the Amigas. 'tsgui' wrote each volume across the network. WinUAE wants sectors and surfaces as if from an Amiga 'mountlist' in order to understand the geometry of the HDF hard file. A tool called 'MakeMountlist' made that easy when the systems (such as the A4000) didn't use old-fashioned mountlists. Once loaded into WinUAE, it easily mounted my old volumes. One tweak to the startup-sequence to map my old volume WinUAE's default volume names, and suddenly I was booting into my exact A2000/040 environment in WinUAE. WinUAE can also mount points on the PC's file system as Amiga volumes, making future archived file retrieval quite easy. - John