CompuServe Messages

Donovan, Yes, backing up to a fast drive is a lot quicker, and it's especially more covenient if you do file backups and later need to restore one or a few individual files. No need to wait while the tape is scanned to find that one file you need, which just happens to be at the very end of the backup!! That ends up taking just as much time as the backup itself. Although tape is convenient, I find, for complete backups and permanent archives, it isn't very convenient if you often need to restore individual files. The unfortunate aspect of it all is that whether you use tape or syquests you are looking at an expensive backup solution. I have a 240 meg hard drive which would require about 4 of the 44 meg cartridges to back up existing files at a cost of about $280, more or less, not including the $400 plus cost of the drive and case. At the current cost of floppies I figure that amounts to about 1,400 floppy disks! Given the speed of tape, I'm no longer convinced that my tape drive is much of a benefit nor am I convinced that the syquest route is either since one doesn't really do backups too often. Gives one pause to think ….