Oppy on its deathbed....

[Joshua W. Burton]

After six years of faithful service, my NeXTcube's magneto-optical
drive is rapidly heading south. That awful <scree> as it finds a
new bad sector seems to occur about a hundred times a day, so that
even disks I _know_ are OK wind up running out of sectors for remap
after a couple of weeks of use. (Reformatting them reveals the
sectors to be fine, but who has the time?) Now I've started to
get `tracking servo failed' errors in the console, and mounting a
new disk almost always requires three or four spin-up-spin-down
sequences. I've cleaned the lens a number of times, but I think
the time to pull the plug may be approaching.

My question: what do people recommend for a stable, reliable,
durable backup solution for the original NeXT hardware? I don't
really like the idea of magnetic tape (no random access, serious
vulnerability to stray fields, and visions of our 2-year-old
pulling yards and yards of DAT out of the cartridge!) and was
surprised to learn that DAT drives are still up near $1k. I
also need a CD-ROM drive, and was thinking about one of these
dual-format gizmos that will read/write 650 MB oppies and read
CD-ROMs in the same drive. Are the MO cartidges reasonably
standard and available? (I was the guy who organized the Last
Great Disk Deal on the NeXT-Canon MO's in early 1994, and I
don't want to be orphaned again.) Are any of these drives
plug-and-play with the NeXT SCSI port? Do the MO disks show
up in the browser as oppies, or as hard disks, or what? How
does the speed compare with the old NeXT-Canon MO? What are
the going prices on these things? Might it make sense to get
a CD-ROM and a backup solution separately, and if so what do
you recommend? Finally (most important!) are any of them
available in BLACK? :)

Right now I'm vulnerable to catastrophic data loss, as my
only backups are on NeXT MO's and I no longer trust my drive
for data integrity. I need to make a decision pretty fast;
I lost a hard drive suddenly two years ago, and don't want to
risk a bad outcome if the same thing happens again! What would
you buy in my place? Thanks for any advice.

Incidentally, if anyone has a NeXT MO drive in good working
condition that they're willing to unload cheap (~ $100), that
would certainly work for me. Please let me know....

BOSNIAN CEASEFIRE: Proposed SI unit +------------------------------------+
of subjective time, to be defined as | Joshua W. Burton (847)677-3902 |
the approximate interval required to | jbu...@nwu.edu |
strip, wipe, oil, and reload a rifle. +------------------------------------+

[Frank M. Siegert]

In <4nrho3$n...@news.acns.nwu.edu> Joshua W. Burton wrote:
> After six years of faithful service, my NeXTcube's magneto-optical
> drive is rapidly heading south. That awful <scree> as it finds a
> new bad sector seems to occur about a hundred times a day, so that
> even disks I _know_ are OK wind up running out of sectors for remap
> after a couple of weeks of use. (Reformatting them reveals the
> sectors to be fine, but who has the time?) Now I've started to
> get `tracking servo failed' errors in the console, and mounting a
> new disk almost always requires three or four spin-up-spin-down
> sequences. I've cleaned the lens a number of times, but I think
> the time to pull the plug may be approaching.

In most cases it is not the lense or the laser. The metal positioning band in
the drive is contaminated (so the positioning optics cannot provide tracking
information and the laser keeps reading and writing between the data tracks).
Get some pressurized air (clean and dry) and carefully clean this band but do
not touch it... you have to disassemble the drive to get there. This method
worked here and resurrected my once dead MOD.

> My question: what do people recommend for a stable, reliable,
> durable backup solution for the original NeXT hardware? I don't
> really like the idea of magnetic tape (no random access, serious
> vulnerability to stray fields, and visions of our 2-year-old
> pulling yards and yards of DAT out of the cartridge!) and was
> surprised to learn that DAT drives are still up near $1k. I
> also need a CD-ROM drive, and was thinking about one of these
> dual-format gizmos that will read/write 650 MB oppies and read
> CD-ROMs in the same drive. Are the MO cartidges reasonably
> standard and available? (I was the guy who organized the Last
> Great Disk Deal on the NeXT-Canon MO's in early 1994, and I
> don't want to be orphaned again.) Are any of these drives
> plug-and-play with the NeXT SCSI port? Do the MO disks show
> up in the browser as oppies, or as hard disks, or what? How
> does the speed compare with the old NeXT-Canon MO? What are
> the going prices on these things? Might it make sense to get
> a CD-ROM and a backup solution separately, and if so what do
> you recommend? Finally (most important!) are any of them
> available in BLACK? :)

Syquest 270er work fine, but the media is not so stable as a MO. But these
drives provide approximately the same size as the old MO. You can paint them
if the color does not suit you 8-).

--
Frank M. Siegert [fr...@this.net] -- Home Page
http://hades.tue.schwaben.de/~frank
NeXTSTEP, Linux & PostScript Guy "In cantonese C++ is called C
ga ga"

[Timothy J. Luoma]

Well, a lot of it depends on how much you have to backup.

As for me, I needed to do two things: 1) a one-time backup of apps, etc
2) a weekly backup of my account (~140 megs).

For me it made a lot of sense to get an EZ drive (as I've mentioned here
already). For $200 I got a drive and one cartridge that formats to NeXT
with 116 megs. For $25 I got a cable to connect my external HD and my EZ
drive. With a phone call to Syquest's 800 number I got a form to fill out
and return with $5 for another cartridge.

One will have my onetime backups (/LocalApps and /LocalLibrary) and the
other will be used constantly for nightly/weekly backups.

For the nightly/weekly backups, I simply created a folder and then linked
all the folders I want to backup to that one folder. Using gzip and
gnutar I make backups of these directly onto the SyQuest disk that "just
works" with black....

The EZ drive is not black, but it is dark grey ;-)

Personally I'm against getting combination hardware for the same reason
I'm against getting a TV with the VCR built-in -- if/when one dies, the
other may go with it or may not be usable.

If you need more space than ~116 megs, you might consider a JAZ drive...

With Jaz and EZ I would feel comfortable knowing that if a giant hole in
the universe suddenly sucked NeXTStep/Openstep away, I'd still be able to
retrieve my data from another Unix platform. (right?)

TjL

--
Timothy J. Luoma
Formerly known as: luo...@capitalist.princeton.edu
New email address: 476...@ptsmail.ptsem.edu (No NeXTmail)