I have two old systems - an Austin and a Dell 310, both running MS-DOS - and I want to backup the hard drives to tape but I'm not sure how to go about starting. They both have tape drives (which is a good sign), as well as 3 inch floppy drives. I can poke around DOS fairly well but I'm not sure how to go about accessing the tape drives or starting the backup process or anything of that sort. If anyone can provide any help it would be massively useful.

- Mike

I am not sure since I don't think that DOS had any native support for the tape drives, so it might be that you would need to look for the program to run it.

If the disks are IDE, then you might consider putting the disk on another computer, either by putting it in an enclosure or internally to the machine. Then you could back up the data to a CD or DVD, which would make it easier to access the data.

Is there a way to tell, in DOS, if the disks are IDE? I know how to identify them by looking at the cables inside the machine, but I'd rather not pry it open.

I am not sure if there is a way to tell in DOS. I don't recall when the disk interface changed. I have a 286 machine which is not IDE, at least I don't think so.

It should not be too difficult to open the case.

So the hard drive is IDE. If I wanted to save all the data on the computer now, theoretically I should just able able to take out the HD, chuck the computer, and put the HD into another machine with a free place for an IDE drive, right? Would any information be lost in that case?

Yes, but don't get rid of the machine until you get a good backup, just in case you need to boot the machine from the disk. If you get rid of it too soon and need it for some reason, you would have a problem.

It is often easier to put the disk in an external enclosure, so that you don't have to mount it or risk it being bumped and/or falling.

Backing up the disk when it is in another machine should get all of the data, whereas if you do the backup when the machine is booted from that disk, there can be files which are locked by the OS, which can prevent the files from being copied.

The only information "lost" would be the boot information since that is not in the filesystem. You could copy the whole disk, which would retain everything, but it would be more difficult to review the data.

As a side note, if you use a non-Windoze OS, such as Linux, it will ensure that no files are accessed on the disk. Sometimes Windoze looks at the disk and will use swap files and such. It should not really be an issue though.