wjb@cogsci.cog.jhu.edu (William J. Bogstad) (06/06/91)
I've been trying to find a way to back up my ISA bus computer to a SCSI tape drive and am having difficulty getting information on the necessary software. The only product I have found is SY-TOS, but I can't find anyone except the manufacturer that sells it. Lots of people sell packaged subsystems that include SY-TOS, but I have my own contacts for the hardware and can get usually get better prices. Or if you know of a company that sells a complete SCSI tape subsystem for around $600-$650 that would work as well. It must be SCSI though. I don't want a floppy-tape system as I want to be able to use the tape drive on other non-IBM PC systems. Any information on this or related topics would be appreciated. Thanks, Bill Bogstad
Andreas.Kaiser@f7014.n244.z2.stgt.sub.org (Andreas Kaiser) (06/07/91)
>I've been trying to find a way to back up my ISA bus computer to >a SCSI tape drive and am having difficulty getting information on >the necessary software. The only product I have found is SY-TOS, but >I can't find anyone except the manufacturer that sells it. Since you will need a SCSI host adapter to connect to the drive, the host adapter's manufaturer should supply the requried Sytos version. I know of versions for WD7000 and AHD154x. I bought the Sytos for AHA154x and the only backup method where both backup *and* restore were reliable was the physical disk backup, which does not allow selective restore. Both file and partition backups were unreliable - software trouble, the tape drive (Tandberg) is ok. Since Adaptecs SCSI programming interface (ASPI) is undocumented and I was told that the documentation is unavailable, I ended up in writing my own drivers for the SCSI tape. The DOS version replaces the Adaptec ASPI4DOS disk driver. Later in OS/2 this approach was inapplicable due to the complexity of the disk driver, so I looked for a cheap Seagate ST01, fixed the builtin hardware bug and wrote a tape driver for this host adapter. Now I use a ported version of GNU-Tar both for DOS and OS/2 backups. An additional benefit is the ability to direcly position the tape to end-of-media and to selected files, the latter one using a Tandberg-specific fast seek command (requires a maximum of 2 track scans). Gruss, Andreas * Origin: kaiser@ananke.stgt.sub.org - Stuttgart FRG (2:244/7014)