Sytos Plus and CMS Jumbo Tape Backup Drives
Rene Bilodeau
Colorado Jumbo drives) just a week or so ago. I was having a lot
of problems with the program. When I went to backup a hard drive
and do a compare under the same procedure, the backup appeared to
work fine and when the tape rewound to start the compare I'd get a
hardware error.
I found that sometimes I could be more successful if I designed a
procedure that just did a backup and a separate procedure that I
would run later to do the compare. Sometimes I could get through
this without hardware errors.
I got tired of sitting on hold listening to muzak trying to get
tech support from Colorado Memory Systems although the call was
toll free. I never did get through to CMS after numerous calls.
Calls to Sytron resulted in the same thing with the exception it
wasn't toll free!
Thanks to this conference I was successful in passing on a message
to Sytron requesting help. No call came for 6 days or so and I had
already called my distributor and got an RMA number to return the
product. Courier company was supposed to pick up the parcel today.
At 6:30 am I get a call from Sytron telling me that they have some
updated drivers that should fix the problems I'm having.
I immediately downloaded them from the Sytron BBS and installed
them. Today I've done backups, compares and restores without a
problem. Once I got a general hang on the system, but it's
happened before and I cannot directly relate this to Sytos Plus as
it was working in the background when this happened.
The short of it, it looks like Sytos Plus will finally work with
my Jumbo 120 running off a FC-10 controller card. The docs with the
new drivers say they can accomodate Jumbos running off floppy
controllers also.
While on the subject I'd like to add some criticisms of the
product that I hope will be addressed in future versions (soon ;-)).
There are only two choices for backups: Compressed and QFA.
Compressed will mean that any restores will take a long time since
the data is laid out sequentially on the tape and there is no
directory created to allow one to move quickly to a particular
file. I also found that after it would finally restore 3 files I
needed, it would still keep running the tape. It wasn't
"intelligent" enough to know it had done its job of restoring the
files I wanted and it could finish with the task. Using QFA is
supposed to be much faster but doesn't allow compression. A
directory is created that allows for faster file retrieval from the
tape.
CMS's DOS Tape program allows both a directory to be created and
files to be compressed. Restores are much much faster than with
Sytos Plus. PCTools backup allows the same thing. I wonder why
this hasn't been implemented in Sytos Plus and whether there are
any plans to do so? If they would come up with a version that would
do this, their product would be quite nice. Since it appears to be
the only game in town at the present time for CMS Jumbos and at
least it backs up my hard drives, I guess I'll have to live with
it.
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Rene Bilodeau Internet: rb...@cusdesign.win.net
Custom design Software FidoNet: 1:351/1106
Royston, BC, Canada CIS: 70062,3710
(604) 334-2263 FAX: (604) 334-3125
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Running under OS/2 2.1
The World's Best Operating System
Larry Truesdale
I never used the CMS product, but are you sure PC Backup uses the directory on
the tape for the purpose you describe? It was my impression that the *.dir
files kept on the hard drive were there to serve this purpose as well as allow
you to find specific files amongst a multitude of archives.
Larry
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Cimarron Boozer
>
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you... Part of that 6 days
was getting your emails transmitted in Sytron... As to the result,
I'm glad to hear things are working better.
I hear your request for QFA with compression. We have incorporated
that, along with other improvements, into a product plan for future
releases. We'll keep you posted as we make further progress!
Thanks for your patience, and let me know via conference or email of any
additional problems, or suggestions.
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Cimarron Boozer
Sytron Corp.