19 May
2001
19 May
'01
11:25 a.m.
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(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk>
To: <classiccmp(a)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:
Unfortunately, I don't have a basement. Wish I did, I'd have more space
for classic computers :-)...
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 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