(Current version is: 17.0, released 2022-October-25)

Support and Documentation

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DFSee support guidelines and procedures

Support for DFSee is limited to the latest versions only (16.x and 17.x). If you have issues with older versions, please upgrade to the latest version first, before getting support on the issue.

Required information

Almost all support issues require some information to be collected. The best and easiest way to do that is use one or more of the standard analysis procedures that come with DFSee:

DFSFAST Menu: 'Scripts - Fast Analyse disks (support)' : For disk/partition level issues on EXISTING partitions
DFSDISK Menu: 'Scripts - Full Analyse disks (support)' : For disk level issues with possible missing partitions
DFSCHK Menu: 'Scripts - Analyse filesystems (CHECK)' : For filesystem level issues on one or more partitions

In all cases, a description on the actual PROBLEM, and on what you remember from what the system/partitions looked like (sizes, partition-types and so on), will also help with a quick and successful analysis.

Email support and recovery assistance

DFSee support supplies email support and some assistance on using the program. However, all such support is on a best effort basis, normally with an email response within a few days.

More involved assistance, like processing analysis results, and creating recovery scripts is NOT free. Depending on the complexity of the recovery, you need to get one or more 'Support Units'. When applicable, you will be informed by DFSee support about the need to buy support units. (Get one or more DFSee support Units. Each unit is € 25)

DFSee support group on groups.io (mailing list)

You can also use the DFSee forum, on the groups.io platform.
Intended as a meeting and discussion place for all issues regarding DFSee.

You can join by responding to an invitation sent to you, or manually using the small form below.

As an alternative, send an empty email to: dfsee-support+subscribe@groups.io and to unsubscribe, use dfsee-support+unsubscribe@groups.io

To change your preferences for emails, or using the web-interface instead, you need to create an account for your subscription email address at the groups.io website.

VIDEO of Warpstock 2022 presentation on DFSee 17.x, Open Source Edition

DFSee instructional and showcase videos

The DFSee instructional and showcase videos is a collection of short videos showing several DFSee program features.

DFSee menusystem and related help text

Compiled from the actual DFSee applications menu-system and help-pages, there is a separate chapter for each of the pull-down menus.

The DFSee menu documentation is a complete reference to every menu-item in the DFSee menu, both BASIC and EXPERT, including the help-screens for every item as well as over a thousand screen-shots documenting the flow of many DFSee functions and showing many of the dialogs. Browsing through this reference is probably the fastest and safest way to learn about the capabilities of the DFSee program.

DFSee and TxWin presentations

Presentations in PDF format on DFSee and TxWin functionality, inner working and scripting

DFSee ASCII-text command references and help files

DFSee help system and other information sources

DFSee is in no way an 'easy to use' program, however there is lots of material available that helps even the casual user with most tasks to be performed.
In general people look for two very different kinds of help when using the program:

HOWTO, as in: How do I do this ? Where the this is some high level description of a user problem
This is hard to catch in built-in help systems or systematic program descriptions since it starts in the problem rather than the solution domain, and is often expressed in terms that do not relate directly to DFSee functionality. It is addressed for DFSee to some extent by providing a summary of HOWTO chapters and by directing users to on-line fora and the public DFSee support forum at Yahoo.
And as a last resort you can always call in private help of DFSee support through email, but be aware that that could take some time to get answers.
HELP, as in: What does this DO ? Where the this is some DFSee menu item of command
This is much easier to answer in a systematic way than the HOW kind of questions, and several mechanisms for DFSee exist:
- For menu items (and most other selection lists), there is a full line of description at the bottom of the screen, so you get a little more info than just the item text alone. Be sure to use this info! For lists of disks, partition or files, it will have additional information like (file/partition) sizes and type, that does not fit in the list display itself.
- There is a Help top level menu that lists several useful things like commandline switches, sector and partition types, scripting keywords and variables, keyboard usage for several areas in DFsee as well as providing some high level help on the user interface and about DFSee.
- For al menu-items, but also for most dialogs or even fields or buttons in a dialog, there is context sensitive help that can be called with the <F1> key. This will pop-up a helptext dialog screen with a brief multi-line description on the topic. Pressing <F1> again often provides a higher level help on the same topic, and using it a third time will give some help on the (TxWin) user interface itself, with information on shortcut and navigation keys, mouse usage and so on.
- The help information on menu items has also been made available on the DFSee website with chapters for each main-menu item
- There are several plain ASCII text file describing several aspects of using DFSee, and containing command references for each of the 'Mode=xxx' operational modes.
  These 'dfs*.txt' files are contained in the binary distributions, but can also be viewed online here (see above).
- There are some presentations on DFSee itself, and on the subject of partitioning and filesystems that give some good background information on these topics (see below).

Tips and DFSee usage information, HOWTO

Several important DFSee procedures and topics explained in in HOWTO chapters or a single

in PDF

DFSee release history

The DFSee release HISTORY shows new features and solved issues for almost all past releases.

Some external DFSee reviews and awards

	A tutorial on DFSee by Tony Butka (Southern California OS/2 User Group)
	Original English version A review by Paul Floyd in the february 2002 VOICE newsletter Die Deutsche ubersetzung The German translation by Manfred Agne
	ASCII transcript VOICE speakup session on the #voice IRC channel about DFSee on the 11th of September 2004 ASCII transcript VOICE speakup session on the #voice IRC channel about DFSee on the 25th of September 2004
	Original English version A tutorial on 'Hard Drive Disaster Recovery using DFSee' by Julian Thomas january 2006 VOICE newsletter Die Deutsche ubersetzung The German translation by Thomas Klein and Christian Hennecke
	Original English version 'USB Removables - Care and Feeding FAQs' by Lon Hooker june 2006 VOICE newsletter Die Deutsche ubersetzung The German translation by Christian Hennecke and Holger Manthey
	DFSee AWARD by OS/2 World.com Voted BEST individual software 2004 and best commercial software 2005!
	eBall AWARD by eComStation and eCoSoft DFSee choosen as best eComStation Utility by eCS users in 2009!

Home | Downloads | Purchase Options | Support and Documentation | Contact info and Photos/Videos JvW

(Support and Documentation page)

Created by Jan van Wijk: May 2005, last update: 2023-Apr-02