D'oh! Backup issue solved

In this the obvious is the words... painfully aware. I have the Adaptec, you get it with their SCSI cards. Not the same as backup though as its controller specific, or it seems to. Tried it once to go from SCSI to IDE and it barfed. Plextor has a tool for this that comes with their CDrw. Obvious limit is you have to have CDW to create and CDr to read and the ~650mb limit of cdroms. Also used is good old 6120 tape (IOMEGA), ok, but so so reliability. There is the OnStream tapes and their tools, not bad but W9x and NT4/sp4 are it's minimia, 30gb! Best for low end SOHO, it works well in both the parallel port and scsi version. The *nix dd tool is a universal screwwrenchdriverhammer! ;) There is DriveImage but the one time I needed it to work it made an impressive mess of the partition table. It seems to want the target partitions to be exactly like the source partition and formatting <bad if you want to go from fat16 to fat32 or NTFS>. Xcopy(32) <dos, win3.x, W9x, NT> does the job ok for any disk/directory at the file level but cannot do the disk low level stuff needed to replicate <clone> a configured system. DOS backup/restore aka hackup and destroy... need i say more. Later DOS MSBACKUP was far better and incompatable format with win9x backup both of which are unintelligible to NT backup. Why VMS backup is better. I can take an image copy of any disk so long as its smaller than the target volume and replicate all of the structures and files. For example a copy of VMS5.4-3 on RD54 (MFM 160mb) to a CMD interfaced RZ56 (680mb scsi). and have a fully useful bootable disk that was not truncated. Or I can do that through an intermediate set of TK50 tapes. This was handy as I needed to install VMS once and I could copy it to N-many systems exactly as created. Maybe this works as there are a common set of standards. This is clearly lacking in the PC realm(non *nix based). Allison From: emanuel stiebler &lt;emu(a)ecubics.com&gt;