The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Editorial Ash Nallawalla ash@melbpc.org.au

Editorials don't often feature product reviews, but I encountered one of those disk crashes that could only be fixed by a good backup. This month's theme includes Office Productivity, which can go for a dive if you happen to lose data.

1b mangle a metaphor, I have a gigabyte taste at a megabyte budget. In other words, no hard disk would be too large for me but I make do by moving data from one PC to another and ultimately to some backup medium.

Sometimes things go wrong. This time fate was doubly sneaky because the PC crashed while I was reviewing a tape backup product! I had moved some tens of megabytes to another PC and I usually do a complete backup at such times. The backup progress indicator showed about 95 percent completed, when I decided to run a screen capture utility. That's when the PC crashed.

No problem, thought I: a reboot would fix it. My PC always runs Norton Disk Doctor (NDD) from the Norton Utilities suite at startup, but it did not complain. Back to my review, possibly with a fresh backup sequence: no, life is not that simple.

Windows would not start. Somehow, NDD had been fooled. Without Windows how was I going to run a Windows-based backup/restore program? I reinstalled Windows, thinking that the corrupt file would be replaced. Wrong again. If the setup program sees a previous installation of Windows, it makes too many assumptions and skips some steps.

I copied the INI and GRP files to a floppy and then deleted all Windows 3.1 files. This time the installation worked properly; I restored the INI and GRP files, but was not out of the woods yet.

I still needed some files from the pre-crash situation. To cut short a long tale, the "95 percent" backup turned out to be good enough for my purposes and I was back to square one. Without that tape backup I would have suffered a major setback.

The Colorado Trakker 250

The backup hardware mentioned earlier is a Colorado Trakker 250 portable tape backup unit. Its main attraction is that it connects to the parallel port of a PC and, therefore, is not dedicated to one machine (but needs special software on each PC that will be backed up.) Many other portable tape backup solutions require a special card in each PC. This makes it awkward for those one-off situations where a PC does not have such a card.

The Trakker comes in 120 MB and 250 MB versions, which refer to the quantity of compressed data one can back up with one tape. Although data loss scenarios are used to sell backup solutions, the maker, Colorado Memory Systems Inc, has chosen to focus on positive and more common scenarios. The company is fully owned subsidiary of Hewlett-Packard.

I find tape backups to be the only low-priced solution for most of us with hard disks in the 100-300 MB region. I think of them as being more data management devices than as first-aid kits. For software that you need to use only once in a blue moon, it is convenient to restore from a configured backup copy than to reinstall from the master disks each time.

The Trakker comes with a parallel interface cable, so you have to plug in your printer at the back of the tape drive. A cut-down version of Colorado Backup for Windows is supplied, which is network compatible. As an option you can get a padded carrying case that holds the Trakker, cable, tapes and power pack.

Colorado Backup for Windows 2.0

You will see some screen dumps of this backup program in action elsewhere in this issue, with the review of the Jumbo, another Colorado tape device. Unlike earlier versions of backup software that were specific to a given family, this one suits a Trakker, Jumbo or a PowerTape.

You operate this software by clicking and dragging the tape icon over a drive icon. If you do that in restore mode, you start the restore process; in backup mode, the backup process. Restoring a specific file is easy, be it by name, a wild card, date, or extension.

A scheduler enables you to run backups in the background. You can move files off the hard disk to a tape from which you can restore later. On a network you can back up a server or workstation. A macro capture option enables you to record various procedures and launch them at the click of a button.

The Internet Service Report

We are very close to getting our eight lines up and running, which will please the administrators, the committee, and the office staff more than it will please the users. While some users lost their patience and took their business elsewhere (enabling the people on the waiting list to get in), most others have begun to enjoy the Internet.

When I am logged in, few others seem to be reading news or writing mail: most are playing a MUD, telnetting somewhere, or FTPing a file. They are having a ball. Some ask if we are going to offer SLIP or PPP access. Yes, that is the intention. The other good news is that the billing period will not start until we have those eight lines up and running.

A more ambitious project is under way. Richard Solly, one of the administrators of melbpc.org.au, has built a World Wide Web page for Melb PC. He didn't want a "boring" information sheet that would be read once by visitors but never again; he is looking at ways to make it a system that will become known throughout the world. We hope to place selected articles from PC Update on the Web and links to other user groups around the world. If you have a good suggestion for this project please contact "admin@melbpc.org.au".

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