esm@cci632.UUCP (Eric Masur) (09/25/90)
I am seriously considering purchasing a Colorado Memory Systems 60/40MB (intrnl) Tape Drive to backup the hard drives on my 386SX. Does anyone have experience with this unit that they could share? (Prices seem to be around $250.00) (This unit pretends to be a floppy drive and hangs off the floppy controller.) I am interested ONLY in backing up my system to prevent against loss in the event of a crash. I will not be using the tape for archiving data and I am not interested in using the tape as a means of transfering data to or from other systems. Speed is nice, but not as important to me as low price and reliability. I am interested in doing mostly full backups as opposed to incrementals since the configuration of my system is somewhat dynamic and in the event of a hard disk failure, I want to restore my drives to exactly what they were like IMMEDIATELY before the crash. (ie I don't want to have to go back and redelete old files that were needlessly restored.) I've got an ST277R (RLL 65MB) and an ST138R (RLL 32 MB) with an Adaptec controller. I use DOS 3.3 and partition my 65MB drive (using FDISK) into a 30MB and a 35MB partition. Some questions I would love to have answered: 1) Are people happy with the units performance and reliability? 2) Can backups span multiple tapes? 3) How flexible is the backup software that is included? 4) Comments on using the floppy controller vs a dedicated controller?
jpd@pc.usl.edu (Dugal James P.) (09/26/90)
In article <40099@cci632.UUCP> esm@cci632.UUCP (Eric Masur) writes: >I am seriously considering purchasing a Colorado Memory Systems 60/40MB > (intrnl) Tape Drive to backup the hard drives on my 386SX. ... >1) Are people happy with the units performance and reliability? Yes. >2) Can backups span multiple tapes? Yes. >3) How flexible is the backup software that is included? No complaints. Does all the usually desired backup and restore types. >4) Comments on using the floppy controller vs a dedicated controller? With a controller that handles quad-density diskettes (1.44 MB) you should get about 2MB/minute xfer rates. My 386 is fast enough to do compression without a throughput degradation. But since I have lots of ZIP and lzexe-ed binaries, I get around a 1.2 compression ratio. I recommend you get the XL cartridges that yield 60MB even without compression. -- -- James Dugal, N5KNX Internet: jpd@usl.edu Associate Director Ham packet: n5knx@k5arh Computing Center US Mail: PO Box 42770 Lafayette, LA 70504 University of Southwestern LA. Tel. 318-231-6417 U.S.A.