BATCH FILE COPYING

by Dick Estel

One of the negative aspects of using a RAM expander with GEOS is the necessity of copying files into
the REU every time you use the program.

The REU acts just like a very fast regular disk drive, but it forgets everything you taught it the minute
you turn off the power. With the one megabyte REU capable of emulating a 1581 drive, file copying
can be a fairly long chore.

Fortunately, several of the private programmers who create things for use with GEOS have come to
our rescue: Joe Buckley and Jim Collette.

Buckley (aka Red Storm) offers his program, REU ZAP, on Storm Systems Disk 1.

To use REU ZAP, you first file copy whatever you plan to use into the REU. Whenever you want to
save the contents of the REU, you run REU ZAP from a real disk drive. This creates a single file which
contains everything that was in the REU.

The next time you use GEOS, you can click on this file, and everything that you saved previously will be
copied into the REU (overwriting anything already there).

The ZAPPED file is NOT compressed--in fact, it is bigger than the total of the original files. Although
the 1-meg REU will hold up to 790K, you can't ZAP more than about 550K. That seems to be this
program's only real drawback.

Jim's program is found on the RUN GEOS Companion disk. It is supposed to copy programs to the
other active drive, REU or real. I have not tested this program.

If you are using a real drive that is the same type as the REU drive (i.e., a 1571 and a RAM 1571), you
can also do a whole disk copy. If you don't have very many files, this can be faster than single file
copying. This is only useful if you want to transfer everything on the disk to or from the REU.

Despite the trouble you may go to finding the best way to get the stuff you're using into the REU, the
speed increase is well worth the set-up time. There are also programs that will automatically run the
copy programs when you boot GEOS, but I have never tested them. When I do, I will give you a
report. 

(The above was first published in November, 1990; read on for a 1993 update.)


As of 1993, and for a couple of years in fact, the program I use for this process is QwikStash, a
shareware program from Q-Link that copies a pre-selected list of files into the REU. With GEOS 64
only it can be set up as an auto-exec file. In my opinion it far outshines REU ZAP. You first run a
module called QwikPik, to create the list of files to be copied. It lists all files on the disk, and you
highlight the ones you want, then save a the data file. Then you can run QwikStash any time to copy the
files in the list. You can go into QwikPik and change the list any time, and you can even create more
than one list. The program creates a data file called QwikData. Rename it and create another list.
QuickStash will use the first file on the disk, but a file named QwikData will take precedence over other
data files, even if they are first on the disk. Just move the ones you don't want to use to the border and
it will use the file on the note pad.

(Via the Commodore Information Center, http://home.att.net/~rmestel/commodore.html)