In article <[log in to unmask]>, David Evans
<[log in to unmask]> writes
>Does anyone in the group have experience of these drives? I just
>bought one to back up my hard disk at home and it seems to take
>forever. It is plugged into the parallel port of my laptop and takes
>at least 20 hours to back up 900 MB of data. Only about 2 hours of
>this time is the backup itself. The rest is the "compare" function
>which verifies the backed up data. Is this normal for external tape
>drives? I expected it to be slow but not this slow!
>
It's down to the parallel port. We tested the Ditto Max and the HP
Colorado earlier this year on a range of PC's and found a wide range of
performance.
Your example of 20 hours for 900M would be on the far right of our
results but by no means was it the worst performer.
As a general rule we found that desktop systems purchased in the last
year gave acceptable performance. As the age of the system increases
the chance of the performance decreasing, increased! Some form of
inverse relationship.
Interestingly, testing on one clone system less than a year old and one
reputable manufacturers 'budget' system would indicate that in their
cases they had saved money by fitting a cheaper parallel port.
The one significant potential that the parallel tape drive appears to
offer is the ability to restore from tape the complete works on to a
clean, empty hard disk.
For people who bought Win95 on a system without a CD ROM and therefore
have the disk based version and the disk based activation key (if you
did not know a CD provided activation key will not work on a disk
install and visa versa) it appeared to be the ideal mechanism for
disaster recovery.
All other mechanisms appear to require the loading on Win95 first and
then the restoration of the backup. 20 hours later for a paltry 900M
and I would rather have loaded by disk!
However there are people in the situation of only having the disks so my
question to the list is:
Does anyone have an easy and fool proof disaster recovery mechanism for
recovery of a failed hard disk on a Win95 system which brings back
everything in one go and which does not require the loading on Win95
first?
--
Mark Thornton @ Droitwich
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