• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

DOS Hard Drive Backup Solutions?

M

mbbrutman

Associate Cat Herder
Staff member
Joined
May 3, 2003
Messages
6,418
I'm on DOS 5 on a 386, and I've been using pkzip. Until now .. apparently I have too many files, and pkzip is complaining about being out of memory.

What are your favorite backup programs? I like using zip files because I can read them on a different machine, but I'm open to other solutions too.


Thanks,
Mike
 
Tape? No way. I'm past that. I had a tape drive for years, but prefer now to create a giant zip or other archive on another machine.

Tar ... I should find a version of tar for DOS. That would work fine even without gzip - I can compress on the server side.


Mike
 
So many of the links are dead. But I'll be digging - tar was a good idea, even if I refuse to use a tape drive. ;-0

I forgot to mention that I was surprised that pkzip failed me. On a machine with 400KB conventional and close to 3MB extended memory still free it should have been able to deal with a few thousand files. Apparently it's trying to build the file list in memory which isn't terribly scalable.


Mike
 
I've always been a fan of LH ever since PKZIP was banned from most bulletin boards. I've got TAR for DOS too if you like. Here is a dir of the ones I use most:
Code: 
LHA      EXE        34,283 07-20-91   2:13a
PKUNZIP  EXE        28,959 05-05-95   6:00a
PKZIP    EXE        42,166 02-01-93   2:04a
UNRAR    EXE        32,086 12-03-98   3:03p
PKZIPFIX EXE         8,926 07-21-89   1:01a
TAR      TXT         2,113 02-18-87  12:07a
TAR      EXE        30,991 05-16-88  12:33a
I put those up as arcprogs.zip if you want to grab them. I also have a archive of more archivers, including ZOO, ARJ, a converter, and more historical stuff which I put up as arcarc.zip if you want the whole kit and kaboodle. (That one is 4.4 Mb and should be extracted with the subdirs.)
 
southbird said:
Why was PKZIP banned?
Click to expand...

I think it was just politically incorrect and discouraged in general but only actually banned on some boards. I can't remember the details, but it had to do with licensing. IIRC the unzip was free for personal use and the zip required a license for public (bbs) use. IOW, if a BBS used zip files on their archives it needed to have a license. That meant you couldn't upload zipped files to all boards, and LH (later called LHA) was preferred because it was free for all. OSLT (or something like that) :)

PS: This could make an interesting thread elsewhere.
 
Back in the day yes I used pkzip although arj became somewhat popular also. You're backing up all programs to one zip I guess instead of zipping them all separately? When I was backing things up I was a huge user of interlink and intersrv. I kept several systems connected with null modem cables and backed up my files that way.

That of course was with my lack of funds then so if you had better resources you could use a network and ftp to archive your files elsewhere.
 
If you have a network card in there, you can use something like Ghost to do a backup over the network to a server location.
 
Would you have better luck with the DOS version of Info-Zip? www.info-zip.org

I've used Info-Zip's zip.exe for years, but I have a lot more experience with the OS/2 and Win32 versions than with the DOS version. The files it creates are fully compatible with PKZip, if that matters.
 
barythrin said:
Back in the day yes I used pkzip although arj became somewhat popular also. You're backing up all programs to one zip I guess instead of zipping them all separately? When I was backing things up I was a huge user of interlink and intersrv. I kept several systems connected with null modem cables and backed up my files that way.
Click to expand...
I used to have 4 systems connected with interlnk and intersrv. It's actually pretty functional as long as you don't have far to go. The files I posted above got here with interlnk. I have a headless DOS machine with old stuff which is connected to my regular DOS machine which is connected to the Lan.

Anyway, I didn't test those programs for memory usage, which is the real issue for this thread. Anybody that wants them will have to do their own suitability testing.
 
One of my favorite dos back up programs was called Fastback plus by 5th generation. There are copies available on various abandonware sites (and thats all I will say about that).

Ran that for a years, until I upgraded to a QIC-02 tape backup, then scsi, and then DAT, and then just a spare HD cause they are so cheap compared to tape drives..
 
I used Fastback too, but it's not a viable option anymore - I want to be sure that I can read the backup set from another machine. That limits me to file-by-file backups, or archive programs like zip, tar, etc.

It's interesting, but the nature of the backup has changed. Back when I was using Fastback I wasn't concerned about the hardware going bad. I was protecting myself against a software error that might wipe out files. Now I'm more concerned about failing hardware, so a backup set that requires the original machine (or something very close to it) be operational is kind of dicey.
 
What about RAR? It has a easy menu- driven interface and you can read the archives on your newish computer (but you will not able to read your archives created with actual versions, since they changed something). You could even make self extracting executables, which work on 8088.

http://www.defsol.se/ftp/x3p/rar250.exe
 
TNC said:
What about RAR?
Click to expand...

I posted that one earlier but neglected to post the full contents of the archive. It is:
Code: 
ARCARC   ZIP     4,498,893 08-08-10   6:52p
GZIP         <DIR>         08-09-10   2:30p
ARCVERT      <DIR>         08-09-10   2:30p
ARC          <DIR>         08-09-10   2:30p
ARJ          <DIR>         08-09-10   2:30p
LDZIP        <DIR>         08-09-10   2:30p
LHA          <DIR>         08-09-10   2:30p
HISTORY      <DIR>         08-09-10   2:30p
TAR          <DIR>         08-09-10   2:30p
MISC         <DIR>         08-09-10   2:30p
IOMEGA       <DIR>         08-09-10   2:30p
ZOO          <DIR>         08-09-10   2:30p
AC           <DIR>         08-09-10   2:30p
RAR          <DIR>         08-09-10   2:30p
PKOLD        <DIR>         08-09-10   2:30p
 
mbbrutman said:
So many of the links are dead. But I'll be digging - tar was a good idea, even if I refuse to use a tape drive. ;-0

I forgot to mention that I was surprised that pkzip failed me. On a machine with 400KB conventional and close to 3MB extended memory still free it should have been able to deal with a few thousand files. Apparently it's trying to build the file list in memory which isn't terribly scalable.
Mike
Click to expand...
As a point of interest, the approximate # of files possible with PKZIP:
With no EMS/UMB: (Free RAM-375K)/64
With EMS: (Free conventional RAM-85K)/64
Use of the SuperFast option (-es) will increase the limit by about 500 files.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top