The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Backup Can Be Worth Its Weight in Floppy Disks if Computer Crashes
Remember the old adage: “The bigger they are, the harder they fall?” It’s never more relevant than the day that great big hard disk on your high-powered new computer dies.
Did you really fill a box or two of floppy disks with copies of all the software that came pre-loaded on the hard disk? Or did you just disable that pesky reminder to do so? And how many diskettes will it take to back up a 500-megabyte hard drive, anyway? More than 300 if it is nearly full.
The truth is that if you don’t have an up-to-date tape backup of your system when it crashes, that computer is going to be out of business for awhile. Depending on what was on it, so might you.
Fortunately, there is no good reason not to have the proper backup tape. There are tape backup systems for every need and in every price range, starting at under $100. The more you spend, the more data you can fit onto one tape and the faster the transfer rate.
There are many well-established manufacturers offering a variety of models, and the choices are less bewildering than they appear.
Iomega Corp. of Roy, Utah, (800) 777-6654, seems to have the edge on price at the moment with the Ditto 1700, a 1.7-gigabyte model going for $299.
If that’s not cheap enough, try the Ditto 250 for $99. Both are internal models, but portable external units that plug into the computer’s parallel printer port are available for $399 and $199, respectively.
For $649 you can buy the Pereos, a gigabyte-sized system that defies belief. It is small enough to fit into a coffee cup, runs on two AA batteries for about four months and stores its data on a Sony-developed tape cartridge about the size of a postage stamp. It is manufactured by start-up Datasonix Corp. of Boulder, Colo., (800) 328-2779.
I also took a look at units from Conner Tape Products Group, Costa Mesa, Calif., (714) 641-1230, Mountain Network Solutions, Scotts Valley, Calif., (408) 438-6650, and Hewlett-Packard Co. of Palo Alto, (800) 752-0900.
I did not test any models from Colorado Memory Systems Inc., of Loveland, Colo., (800) 845-7905, a Hewlett-Packard subsidiary with a competitive lineup of models.
The choices in deciding what kind of tape backup system to buy fall into four categories: tape storage capacity, type of tape, type of drive interface to the computer and whether the unit should be internally mounted or a stand-alone external model. The answers to these questions will determine how much you pay.
Tape capacity can be misleading because everybody advertises the capacity their product has when the stored data has been compressed by a factor of 2 to 1.
The compression function is generally included in the backup software that comes with the tape drive, but in reality you may achieve more or less than that compression ratio.
For instance, I typically got about 1.7 to 1 compression overall with the files I used to test the Iomega drives.
If you buy a tape drive with a larger capacity than your hard drive, you’ll have no problem. (You can use multiple tapes to back up a hard drive that is larger than a tape drive’s capacity, but that means you can’t do unattended backups in the off hours.)
The least expensive type of tape drive uses quarter-inch-wide tape cartridges, which are similar in size to audiotape cartridges. This technology has been around for years, always at the bottom end of the tape drive marketplace, but the engineers keep breathing new life into it with technical tweaks.
When you get into the file server or advanced workstation arena, 4-millimeter digital audio tapes offer even higher capacities, up to 8 gigabytes compressed. Those cartridges are actually physically smaller than the QIC cartridges.
The drive interface choice is linked to whether the drive is an internal model or external. To install a tape drive internally you must have an empty drive bay accessible from the front of your computer. You may need a technician or a technically savvy friend examine your computer to determine that.
Internal tape drives come in various models, the least expensive designed to connect to the floppy drive controller card and more expensive models with their own SCSI controller cards.
A new alternative, just announced by Conner is based on a special high-performance hard disk controller card called ATAPI IDE. Conner’s 4-gigabyte (compressed) Tape-Stor 4000-IDE model boasts a 54-megabyte per minute transfer rate and has a suggested price of $629. That’s faster than high-performance SCSI drives claim.
External tape drives connect either to a parallel printer port or an external SCSI connector for computers with SCSI controllers built in or added inside. The parallel port models are the slowest performers, but some are fairly fast. They don’t interfere with printing because you plug the printer cable into the drive and printer signals are simply passed through the drive connections unimpeded.
I like parallel port models because they are easy to switch from computer to computer. That is an excellent way to transfer large data files from one computer to another, for instance large database or graphics files that won’t fit on floppy disks. I was able to get transfer rates of 4 to 8 megabytes a minute testing various parallel port tape drives on three different computers. That is slower in some cases than advertising claims, but fast enough to be useful.
The unique Pereos unit, which weighs only 10 ounces, achieved 7 megabytes a minute. It offers true portability with backup software well-designed for transferring sets of files on and off of a laptop. One nice feature is called “fuzzy find,” which helps you find files whose names you can’t remember. Considering the tiny size of the tape cartridges, you could literally carry all the data off of your network file server in your briefcase.
Iomega’s 250-megabyte Parallel Port II, recently repackaged for $199 as the Ditto 250 at the bottom of the company’s new Ditto line of tape systems, achieved an 8-megabyte per-minute transfer. It is a rugged unit that has literally been shipped coast to coast to enable data file transfers from one computer system to another.
The new Ditto 1700 ran at about the same speed. Conner’s Tape-Stor 850, about $430, was a little slower through the parallel port, measuring about 7 megabytes per minute.
The internal version of the same drive is under $300, reflecting the typical price differential between the two kinds of drives.
Slowpoke of the bunch was Mountain’s FileSafe Sidecar II, about $300, which managed only 4 megabytes a minute. Like the other manufacturers, Mountain offers a full range of faster and more capacious models. I was surprised that performance for a DAT tape system running off a SCSI interface wasn’t that much faster than the much cheaper parallel port models.
The Hewlett-Packard JetStore 2000, with 2 gigabytes of storage, compressed, achieved only 10.5 megabytes a minute running under Windows NT on an AST Pentium 90-MHz computer. It costs more than $1,000.
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Business Computing welcomes your comments but regrets that the author cannot respond individually. Write to Richard O’Reilly, Computer File, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053, or message oreilly@latimes.com on the Internet.
