Backup drive, tape, zip or what?

[drdan]

Well, we really need a better backup system at our office and we are going to need to transfer over our whole system to this new computer when it comes in. Right now we back up our data files in our medisoft system every night. This takes about two floppies per Dr. or about 10 minutes total. We really only have sporadic backup of microsft word documents which contain a lot of correspondence that is important. Our msbackup utility doesn't work for some reason. Anyway I think I am going to go ahead and get some type of backup drive, preferably external, so we can do more thorough and maybe automatic backups. Right now we use floppies and the backup/restore in Medisoft to keep both systems current.

What drive would be likely to easy and reliable to use, as well as easy to tranfer and reconnect between the two machines. Also cheap. I have an internal tape backup in my old 386(how embarrassing) that worked pretty well with that old DOS system. I think it used quick 80?? tapes. Any chance that would work at least as a backup device in one machine. I think when I had it installed about 5 years ago it would also work with windows. Would it possibly work with current machines and OS's. If it would how much trouble would it be to set up?

I saw that Iomega has a new 250mb zip drive but saw very mixed reviews on Amazon about it. I believe we also tried an Iomega backup on this Gateway about a year and a half ago and not only did it not work but I suspect that's what messed up our regular backup utility on Win 98.

Comments or suggestions, what to do, what to avoid?

[tjaymadison]

Take a look at Backup Methods, Devices and Media (http://www.pcguide.com/care/bu/method.htm) in The PC Guide.

If all your systems have USB ports, you could get by with just one drive, Zip or CD-RW.

RW media is cheaper, more reliable, and can be read by almost any CD-ROM drive.


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[kenja]

When Zip drives first came out, they were a great deal for doing backups such as you describe. Each of my computers has a Zip 100, but I can't remember the last time I used one. Reason? CD-R!

The internal 8x4x32 drives seem reasonably priced to me, and the CD-R media is dirt cheap when bought in quantity on a spindle. The usb models I've seen are more expensive and slower, but probably fast enough for your needs.

If you're going back up an entire partition (or disk), Norton Ghost or PowerQuest Drive Image are both good choices. The newer versions of these programs can write directly to many models of CD-RW drives, but not to USB drives (at least for Ghost).

[This message has been edited by kenja (edited 06-28-2001).]

[spaceAlien]

my 2 cents --

1) designate some shared drive (partition) on your network as a "file server" -- tell people to put important stuff there -- put your enterprise data on the same machine.

2) get a (SCSI) tape unit capable of saving 4-8 GB and attach to that machine (plan on spending about $800 -- I would recommend a DAT unit)

3) start a regular, un-attended, nightly backup rotation of those important partitions -- once a week, twice a week, daily -- whatever you're comfortable with. When you come in in the morning, all you have to do is take out the ejected tape, and stick in the next in the rotation.

4) periodically take a tape out of the rotation for archive. take one off site ocassionally also.

5) IMPORTANT -- try restoring to a unused partition, so that you can be sure that you are backing up what you think you are backing up.

all for now --
Blue skies --


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[kayofcircles]

My husband recently had to buy a new HP tape drive for the office puter because he could no longer find tapes to work in the old HP tape drive. Six months later, he had to buy a new puter and the "new" tape drive wouldn't work with ME, so had to buy new version of Colorado Backup. We bought an external HP tape drive thinking that we could back up data while making transfer...but it only works with the 98 (old) puter. So. Concur with advice above...tape drives very slow, hard to find tapes and if can find are expensive, don't always work, etc. His office has limited means, so we're stuck with the tape choice...but we would recommend against tape drives.

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Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.
Teach a man to fish and he will eat for the rest of his life.
-- Chinese proverb

[spaceAlien]

Geez -- what can I say?

Yeah, tape drives can be a real pain in the neck to set up, especially configuring SCSI adaptors. I won't bother you with any of my stories.

The benefit, from my standpoint, is that all I have to do is put in a different tape if I see that the tape has been ejected. It's simple to do, and easy to remember.

It comes down to a backup philosophy. If you're supporting a workgroup, then you really want to centralize with a file server. Even if you can't afford a real "server" you can press a workstation into the print/file server role.

Then, everything that needs to be backed-up sits on one partition. I've been an eNTee kinda guy for 3+ years now, and I use the NT BACKUP program along with the AT Scheduler Service.

Grins --


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[skhips]

Unless I've picked up things wrong (which wouldn't be a first)
it sounds that you have 2 standalone PC's, a budget to consider.

Depending on the size of data you need to back up which if it fits onto two floopys can be know more than 3mbs per machine, and their is chance a that massively increasing I would get a 100mb or 250mb Zip drive (external)(you can buy one to fit your paralell port or one for your USB(which is faster) which can then move between machines and the Zip disks can be reused, I know you can use CD-RW but I am under the impression that these are not as reliable.

Also good if you start to use a Laptop.

If you get USB ensure you have it USB on your machine and you are not using or going to use Win 95 or NT4.

[drdan]

Thanks for the info. I've done some more research to get me up to date on current backup devices (thanks for the tip tjay). When I first started using a computer for billing about six years ago I had an internal tape backup installed for less than $100. Well, actually it was after my system crashed and I found out just how pissed off a secretary can get when she has to re-enter 3 months work. It would make six complete mirror image backups of my entire hard drive contents on one tape (quic 80?). That worked out perfectly and I had it set to backup every night at 2:00 AM and rotated tapes with one always offsite. Since it was an unstable custom system and crashed about every 2 months I used restore a lot but never lost more than a days work. That was a 386 which I had upgraded from a 286 and had DOS only. I actually still have it set up since I have to print files for old cases still in litagation occasionally. Anyway, our current system is so much bigger and our new system is MUCH bigger and that old tape drive system is not going to work without spending about as much as I did for the computer itself. Fortunately I am not as vunerable now because this is easily obtainable software rather than a custom system. All I really need is a reliable copy of my data files in a safe place and I could lose everything in a fire and still have everything for my practice data up and running in a few days. Data files are easily restored back into new medisoft software. The thing that was mostly concerning me was our office correspondence not being regularly backed up from MS word due to our backup utility having a glitch. So, I have come full circle to probably staying with floppies if I can find some way to backup MS word documents. I have installed some Norton utilities onto the computer and I'm going to try their backup to see if I can get a good backup of our documents on a floppy or two. If I've got practice data and documents backed up I am not worried about backing up our entire system, I was just thinking in terms how I used to have to do it.

So, I actually do have a question after all that rambling to no good purpose. Is there a way to download or otherwise obtain just the msbackup utility for Win 98? I think the copy we're using came with our Gateway 333 a couple of years ago and I can't find any kind of restore CD or Win 98 registration info. Currently when I try to use msbackup everything seems to be fine when setting up the backup, and it looks like it's backing up the first disc and then all of a sudden it asks for a disc with some kind of info on it. I can't remember exactly but it's like it is asking for the first disc from todays' backup even though I am starting a new backup with freshly formatted blank discs. Anyway it totally prevents use of msbackup (at least for me).

skhips, you are correct on both counts, two stand alone computers and no interest in spending more for backup than I did for the system, especially after thinking it through a little more, as outlined above.

[Paleo Pete]

Your existing QIC 80 should work fine on a win98 machine, mine does. Installing was no problem, it plugs into the floppy cable with an extra cable made for it, start the computer without a tape in it and it detects and installs. MS Backup uses it without any trouble, from the sound of the file sizes you're dealing with it should accomodate them easily. Your curerent setup probably won't work with floppies due to something in the configuration, usually it should work quite well with tape or floppy, and it's basically Seagate's Backup Exec without a few advanced features that aren't usually required. Good program...

CD-R is also very useful, and media is not as expensive. A burner would only be necessary in one machine, a standard CD ROM should read the disks, but for the file size you're talking about you would have to save them for 6 months or more to fill a CD...rewritable would be the only way I'd go in your case. And it may be useful for more than basic backups. CD's are the most reliable media form as well. Tapes can be erased by magnetic fields, floppies too, hard drives can crash...

Zip drives don't have a very good reputation, when they were first produced they were pretty well liked, but later turned out to have problems. Zip Drive Click of Death (http://www.grc.com/clickdeath.htm) has some info worth checking out before deciding on one.

An LS-120 might be worth considering, plugs in and is seen as a standard floppy drive, uses standard 1.44MB disks too, (yes it will boot to one) and 120MB should be large enough for daily backups of the size you're using and can be used more than once.

The network setup would probably be the easiest and most reliable to use, with something like a weekly file backup, but the most expensive to set up if no network is currently installed and you had to have another machine as a dedicated file server. That might be worth considering though, a file server doesn't have to be blindingly fast, just have NT Server installed and a good sized FAT partition. A P-200 to 266 or so would make an excellent file server, and may be available fairly cheap.

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[drdan]

Well, I tried the Norton backup wizard and all I can find to backup are programs not data files. All I want to do is a simple compressed backup of our documents in ms word. Any suggestions on how to fix Microsoft backup in our Win 98? I can just copy these to floppies but it would take about 30 of them and I would need to label as to which letters were on which floppy - yuck.

[skhips]

Remove and reinstall or if your have Norton Utilities you could run the Win Dr as this corrects certain windows problems.

Floopys are not very reliable though, but if you are not going to buy any of the kit mentioned above you need to ensure that youre daily backups are done on seperate labeled disk (mon, tue, etc.) and rotated weekly so if a disk goes corrupt you can go back a day extra.

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[Rick]

Drdan

I'll start this by saying.
I have always used tape drives for my backups and will continue to do so.
I also Avoid Proprietary Hardware Like HP's stuff
( Personal Preference is SCSI Tape)

I have used Nortons backup for many years Until They quit supporting it.

The easiest way to get Nortons or any other Backup software to
work with the files YOU want to backup is to change the Archive Bit On those Files.

You can do this to each individual file or all the files in one folder.
Just Highlight the files and right click on them.
Choose properties , Then remove the check mark from the Archive Box.(In Win98)

You can also do it using the dos Attrib command with the -a switch

Then Just run an incremental backup and all files without the archive bit set will be backed up

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