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Recovering from obsolete MSBACKUP .qic file

RickNel

Veteran Member
Joined
Apr 24, 2009
Messages
641
Location
Canberra, Australia
I've just rebuilt a 486-DX machine to replicate the family PC we had from '94 to about 2000 when it was scrapped.

Part of the reason was purely sentimental - to restore the snapshot of family games, documents, and MIDI-based music that had fascinated the kids at that time. I knew I had backed up the old machine before updating to a fabulously fast Pentium 266.

Welcome to Format Follies in a world of non-standard planned obsolescence - thanks Microsoft and friends.

First obstacle to restoring the backup: all CD readers reported the backup file "corrupted" and unreadable. I almost believed them. Then I remembered I had written the backup to CD-RW using the "latest" technology, thinking this would be most transparent to read back. More fool me.

CD-RW was plagued by different standards. I knew I had used Nero software, but current Nero software would not read the disk. Their brand of CD-RW access was called InCD, but later they used the same name for a different CD-RW format.

Finallly I located an old Nero install disk with InCD 4 on it. I uninstalled all current Nero software and installed the old InCD 4. With that I could read the obsolete CD-RW perfectly. There was nothing "corrupt" about it, just bad information from software producers.

I read the 128Mb backup file Old486.qic onto HDD, reinstalled up-to-date Nero, and burned the file back onto a standard CD-ROM.

Next problem - the .qic backup file is a compressed format that can only be read by MSBACKUP.EXE of Win95 or Win98 vintage. So the CD-ROM went into the re-built 486 machine with Win95 installed.

Yet another problem - MSBACKUP refused to "restore" the archive because it did not detect the same HDD that the backup files had come from. In other words, MSBACKUP could not be used to clone a drive. Consistent with Microsoft copying paranoia, but I don't recall the instructions ever making that clear. If backup is to protect against disk failure, what is the use of a backup that won't write to a new HDD?

A few companies have made a business of getting around this folly. Fortunately, there is also one public-spirited and qualified enthusiast who was ticked off by the same issues with MSBACKUP. Willy Krantz reverse-engineered command-line extraction tools for the public domain, released under GNU license.

See http://www.fpns.net/willy/msbackup.htm for the links to MSQIC.EXE together with Willy's rants and technical explanations about the hows and whys. He also has a utlility to extract from the .BKP files made by the later versions of MSBACKUP (yes, Microsoft was not backwards compatible with itself)

It took a bit of doing, but I was able to first decompress the archive, then do a full extract of the 4000+ files. There is supposed to be a way to extract selectively by directory, but I couldn't figure that out. Willy's rants do not encourage requests for help. I don't advise trying to use those DOS utilities on a 486 machine. Decompressing 128Mb took 12+ hours. Meanwhile I decompressed another copy on a modern PC, in a DOS (CMD) window, in about a minute

About half an hour of culling unwanted system files and I was where I wanted to be with the saved content from 1994- 2000.

A few hours earlier, I was on the verge of snapping that "corrupt" CD-RW into the waste bin. Thanks to Google, community forums, and a particularly determined hacker, I recovered everything I wanted from the traps set by the industrial software giants.
 
Very nice and.. recognizable story..
I'm sitting on a pile of QIC-40XL tapes, with a tapedrive that died, and software that is drive specific..
I'm weary of starting my attempts..
 
Jorg;bt535 said:
Very nice and.. recognizable story..
I'm sitting on a pile of QIC-40XL tapes, with a tapedrive that died, and software that is drive specific..
I'm weary of starting my attempts..

I guess obsolete tapes take you to an even deeper level of the Inferno.

My two worst dead-end investments were LS-120 0ptical disks and CD-RW.

And we remember how all those non-standard innovations seemed like such a good idea at the time - until something better came along. It points to technical Darwinism, not Intelligent Design, as the ruling principle.

But in this particular Vintage Forum, we doomed obsolescents live to fight another day!
 
You might try to find a compatible drive, then use Linux to copy the raw data to a disk file for crunching. IIRC, QIC-40XL is compatible with DC2000 drives, which, at one time, were as common as cockroaches.

You can get the data with a little ingenuity. I've done much harder stuff.

It all depends on how much work you want to put into it.
 
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