[Coco] SCSI tape driver for OS-9?

[Gene Heskett]

On Wednesday 15 July 2009, Steven Hirsch wrote:
>Just curious if anyone has seen a tape driver for OS-9 or any tar-like
>applications for backup?  I have a Cloud-9 SCSI cartridge and would love
>to use one of my older streaming tape drives for backup.

It would have to be a really old slow drive, else the coco's streaming speed 
would likely 'shoe-shine' the drive to death in short order.  Even at the 
optimum interleave on the floppy for bru, it still took around 9 minutes to 
write a 765k floppy with bru.  But the killer was the 33 minutes it took to 
restore from that same floppy.  Multiply that by the approximately 90 such 
disks it took to backup what was on the old Maxtor 120 megger, and you can see 
why I only did that once.

At one point years ago, I had a pair of 10 meg hd's on my office machine at 
the tv station, and I used a cron driven copy of 'cp' to make one drive a 
mirror of the other for backup purposes since there was the src's for a couple 
of proggies I wrote that were used many times a day at WDTV, the loss of which 
would have put a serious crimp in things until I had re-invented those wheels 
again.

I had it set to fire off at night, but one of the drives got to squealing and 
janitorial was concerned.  A bit of lube on the spindle grounding spring would 
stop it for a week maybe so I eventually stopped it, just making sure I had 
backups of that stuff on a few floppies.  I still have the whole setup in the 
basement now.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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