My computer crashed. It was not really a crash. It was more like the big chill. One moment the computer chips were merrily processing data. The next instant they were suspended in cyberspace the electronic equivalent of chicken suspended in an eternal aspic.
The little tape backup unit that had come with the computer was no help. Despite hours of coaxing and several software upgrades, the tape backup unit continued to view its job with the glacial disdain of a headwaiter.
The answer to my woes was the nine-track tape drive. While we view these drives as a way to shovel mainframe data on to our PCs, they are able to perform several other valuable functions.
The software that comes with the drives sold by Computer Logics, for example, includes utilities that can backup a hard disk and copy tapes. Both programs are relatively easy to use and very dependable.
Tired of listening to the internal tape back up unit hoot, hum and whistle to no great effect, I put a blank tape on my nine-track drive and switched to my directory of utilities. A program, aptly named "Save", copies the contents of my hard drive to magnetic tape. In an era of graphical interfaces, mouse buttons and dialog boxes, it has all the appeal of a battered Ford truck with a loose muffler.
On the command line, you type "Save c:\*.*/s". This tells the program to copy all the contents of the root directory. The "/s" switch says to copy all the subdirectories. When you need to restore the files to disk you type in the companion program, "Load", and the data comes flooding back. It may not be pretty but it has one major advantage. It works and it works. In the time it took to format a tape cartridge, I had copied all the files from my 660 megabyte hard disk to three reels of tape.
The cognoscente will point out a number of caveats. Reels of tape are awkward compared to a little cartridge. The Save and Load utilities do not handle data compression. And there is that ugly command line interface. All true and completely beside the point. Tape backup programs can be many things but they must above all else be super reliable and reasonably fast. And that is where these utilities shine.
The other essential are two utilities Dupin and Dupout. If you need to copy a tape, this is about as simple as you can get. Put the tape you want to copy on the drive, type "Dupin" followed by a file name, and an exact duplicate of what is on the tape will be copied to your hard drive.
When Dupin is done, mount a blank tape on the drive with the plastic read/write ring installed and type Dupout and the name of the file. The program copies the disk file back to the tape and a duplicate tape is made.
The only cautionary note is to check the amount of free space on your hard disk. If you don't have room to hold the contents of the tape, housecleaning is in order.