The problem he's addressing isn't one with windows, Tony, it's with the backup
software. I once had a VERY effective backup regimen based on DOS and a
software tool set obtained from the manufacturer of my Exabyte tape drives,
together with Novell, who made the networking software I then used.
Unfortunately, with the appearance of Win95 and its associated long file names,
this utility doesn't work well, i.e. it will backup, but can't restore
long-named files, so it isn't terribly effective with Win9x. The drive backs up
at nominally 30+ MB/minute, and will read/write at that rate under Windows just
fine, yet won't work at much better than 10 MB/min with any of the backup
utilities I've tried out. Since this is a problem common to all the backup
utilities, I'd say it's a problem with the way software developers view SCSI,
rather than with the OS, since the OS will read/write at rated speed using
"Direct Tape Access," but not with the backup tools. I wish I could explain it.
I find it odd that the backup tools all insist on SCSI-II tape drives, when
every SCSI-II function can be produced with a combination of SCSI-I commands.
I think what is being pointed out here is not the consumption of 3 hours in
favor of recovering a 13 kB file, but the nominally $100 an hour one gets for
the job on behalf of the VERY grateful client.
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tony Duell" <ard_at_p850ug1.demon.co.uk>
To: <classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Saturday, May 19, 2001 12:24 PM
Subject: Re: tape drives
> >
> > At 06:32 PM 5/18/01 +0100, Tony Duell wrote:
> > >But if you don't have automatic fast forward (and some way to judge the
> > >approximate postiion of the tape automatically), then finding a
> > >particular file is consists of rewinding the tape to the start and then
> > >reading the tape (at normal speed) until you find the file you want.
> > >Which, using one side of a C90 cassette, could take 45 minutes. This is
> > >going to get boring fast.
> >
> > You've got to get out of basement more often, Tony. :-) Why, just
>
> Unfortunately, I don't have a basement. Wish I did, I'd have more space
> for classic computers :-)...
>
> > yesterday afternoon I made several hundred dollars babysitting someone's
> > WinNT box, coaxing its 5-gig Travan cart tape backup unit to
> > retrieve one 13K file, and that took about three hours total
>
>
> But if what I find when I leave my machine room and get into the 'real
> world' is machines running Lusedoze that take 3 hours to recover one 13K
> file (heck, my calculator is faster than that), then I am not sure I want
> to 'get out more' :-)
>
> -tony
>
>
Received on Sat May 19 2001 - 18:25:39 BST