Backing up your system should be one of the easiest things that you can do to your system, and it is certainly one of the most important, but it is also certainly one of the most neglected tasks that ever get done. Many systems of course do not have a convenient backup device on their system, although such devices can be bought for about a hundred bucks. While some sort of backup software program has come with every PC since DOS 1.0, generally you will need to spend some more bucks to get a package that can do the whole job, and do it easily enough so that you, the owner, will actually use it.
Backing up a DOS 1.0 system was rather easy. You only had one or two floppy disks on your system, and software programs existed to easily copy one floppy to another on the standard dual floppy system. And the software could even copy a whole floppy to another on a single floppy drive system, although this took rather a lot of floppy swaps to complete the process.
When disk drives finally were supported with DOS 2.0, things got slightly more complicated, but at that time a 10MB disk was a big deal, and this was only 30 floppies of the 360KB variety. Now with 5GB disks not uncommon, backing up to floppy is quite impractical, except for individual directories.
Magnetic Tape storage has been around since the beginning of computers. The Univac 1 did not have a disk, but it did come with a huge number of tape drives. I understand that these tape reels weighed more than the average boat anchor. For probably the first decade of mainframe computer history, shuffling data on magnetic tapes around was just about the whole reason that computers existed. Over time, the density of these tape drives increased from about 200 Bytes Per Inch, to 800, 1600, up to 6250 for some odd reason.
Tape drives were not found real early on Personal Computers, but they were certainly available by the late 80's. Tape drives on personal computers differed from their mainframe counterparts in that the tape was encased in a cartridge, rather than a reel, and the data stream is generally a single serial track at a time, rather than 9 parallel tracks that you found on the mainframe. The tape device does hold multiple tracks, but they are written one track at a time, with the tape reversing for each track. Compression techniques could double the effective data storage. More recent tape formats, DAT tapes, record data like a video tape drive does using a helical scan technique.
These newer tape devices have kept track with the growth of the disk drives over the years. At the beginning of this decade, a disk drive that contained a couple hundred megabytes was the norm, and the QIC-80 formatted tapes were produced that also held a couple hundred megabytes. As disks got bigger, so did the tapes, with the DAT tapes holding several gigabytes. Mainframe systems have tape devices capable of terabytes using automated cartridge loading devices.
However, as usual, it was the software that did not keep track. I bought my first computer system in 1994. It came with a gigabyte disk, and a QIC-80 drive that held 200+ MB. But even then, Windows 3.x still fit in much less than 100MB, and there were no applications that I knew of then that took up more than 100MB, so backups could be done on a chunk-of-disk method: one tape for the OS, one for your word processor, one for your graphics, and one for your data.
All this changed when Windows 95 came out. All of a sudden the OS was larger than the size of the tape. More importantly, there was no way to reinstall a crashed system disk. That is, if your C: drive disk got creamed, or was physically toast, you could not reload a new disk drive from your backup tapes. There were a number of reasons for this, but the long file names completely obsoleted all the existing tape backup software that existed, and the only way to get native W95 tape backup software to run was to have W95 already running; but of course, if it was your system disk that crashed, then you did not have a W95 available to run your backup program with.
Most of the backup programs that were written for W95 told you this only in the real fine print of the documentation, and you got to read that only after you had already bought the product. And, to make life even more interesting, if you had upgraded to W95 from W3x, you had no way to get W95 reinstalled, even from the CD, unless you went all the way back to your original W3x system and did the upgrade again. (New systems sold after W95 came out did come with a CD that would self install, and probably now that is the majority of systems, but it aint my system.)
So, for many practical purposes, even with the best tape drive and the best software available, you really did not have a complete backup, one that could be reloaded onto a blank disk.
About a year ago, when the Egghead store still existed here in Spokane, I found a piece of software named NovaBack that claimed it could deal with this problem. I laid out my sheckels, and was finally allowed to read the fine print, and yes it probably will reload your system onto a blank disk, but there were a couple of catches.
Catch number 1 was that its standard backup mode did not write a format that could do this. You had to select a special option during the backup, and you created a tape that only could be used for a full disk restore. That was not so bad. But then there was:
Catch number 2. It turns out that Nova corp was too cheap to license the current version of DOS from M$, so they went and got an older, but cheaper version of DOS that runs when you are restoring this special full disk backup tape. That is, during the backup procedure, a special floppy is created that is a DOS clone. The only problem is, this DOS clone does not understand long file names. Since W95 will not run without long file names, you have this problem. But it turns out that there is a way around this problem. There is a bit in the registry of W95 that tells it that while the bit is set, that the system is not to use the long file name option. Of course, that markedly limits you to what the system can do for you, but it can run the NovaBack backup. When the restore program runs later, all the long filenames are somehow recreated, and you have a working W95 system again.
Catch number 3 was that, if your system crashed for whatever the reason during the backup, like because of a power fail or your cat jumping on the keyboard or something, you are up the well known creek. W95 cannot restart with this registry bit set, and of course, you cannot reset the registry bit unless you have W95 running, but ....
I was very reluctant to try this option, but because my five year old C drive on my system was making Very Horrible Noises, I really needed to do something to install a new disk drive in its place. (I know, I could have popped in a new disk as D, done a gang copy to it, and then removed the C drive, and reconfigured D as C. But that would not make for an interesting article.)
Somehow I came across a product named Seagate Software Backup Exec. These guys too claimed that they could restore to a blank system disk in the case of a total system disk crash. They had a web site, and I pored over every syllable on that site to see what the catches here would be, and I could not find any. (Regretfully, I did not look at the customer gripe line newsgroup on their web site - then).
So I bought the product. The short story is that, yes it works. It will create a standard backup tape, and with a selected option, a bootup floppy that will restore this tape to your formatted disk. First you must somehow save your system onto tape (or Zip drive). And this can be a good trick, with a W95 system extending to close to 300MB now. The standard tape for a QIC-80 drive holds only a little over 200MB. However, special extended QIC-80 tapes are sold that will hold as much as 800MB. However, the Backup Exec software in its standard mode will not read these tapes. It turns out that the only way you can get Backup Exec to read these large tapes is to disable the DMA accessing, which hugely slows down the restore process (it took close to 8 hours to restore my disk drive). And, of course, nowhere in the documentation does anything tell you that you have to do this. That is where the gripe newsletter came in handy.
So, to restore the tape, first install the boot floppy that you generated. This loads in some form of, possibly the official version of, the latest DOS. This DOS then runs a very simple program that only knows how to restore a tape. You start it up, and come back the next day to find that you can now reboot the system and have your full W95 system presented before you.
Of course, to avoid a lot of this, you could spend almost $300 to get a full install version of W95. Or, you could upgrade to W98. W98 has the new feature, as far as I am concerned the only feature that makes it worth buying, that once you have upgraded to W98 on your system, you can then generate a boot floppy that will allow you to do a full install of W98 from the upgrade CD, something that the W95 upgrade disk did not allow you to do. From that, you could install your backup software (any version, just about), and then restore your applications using that software.