🚀 go-pugleaf

alex@mercer.demon.co.uk (Alex Chapman) writes:

>I've just had the scare of my life recovering a harddisk full of
>information after a hard crash.  It has finally persuaded me to
>do something which I have been planning to do for months...

>_get myself a tape backup device_

>Now, I've heard various horror stories about using certain devices/
>applications with OS/2 WARP.  Ideally I want a tape drive that will
>plug into a parallel port, and backup OS/2 or Windows systems
>unattended.  Can anyone recommend something, before I lose the impetus
>to do something about it ;)  Thanks for any feedback,

I would seriously recommend going for SCSI, rather than a parallel
solution.  The main reason?  Your tape drive will be useable on any
other machine that supports SCSI in the future as well!

I use a Sankyo CP150 SCSI QIC150 drive in my PC.  I use GNU tar to
backup my HPFS and FAT partitions.  I also use GNU tar for Unix to
back up my Unix partitions.  A very flexible solution, although not
too hot on the ease-of-use front, though I suppose the invocation:

tape erase
tape rewind
tar cv2 d:\*.*

shouldn't be beyond too many people...  the software's free too!

The OS/2 port of GNU tar supports extended attributes properly too.
I tell you, having decent tape backup has saved my neck countless
times, and also makes repartitioning your hard disk easy.  I wanted to
transfer 50Mb from a Linux partition to an OS/2 partition.  Backing
up, repartitioning, reformatting and restoring both operating systems
took an hour.

Tim.