EZ backup of Win95 ...

[Bill Moseley]

Backing up Win 95 to a local and protected part of the hard disk is a nice
idea.  I have made complete copies of the Win 95 directory structure in a
separate directory for backup and then I can modifying MSDOS.SYS to boot
from either copy.  But this is not a protected part of the hard disk.  A
linux partition would be protected, although that wouldn't protect against
total disk failure.

The big problem with Win 95 backups as I see it is the long file names --
long file names only work when Windows 95 is running.

This means that to restore your computer from a complete disk failure you
may have to (worst case)
1) Boot with a DOS floppy, FDISK and Format the hard disk
2) Find the real-mode CD-ROM driver and modify config.sys and autoexec.bat
3) reinstall Win 95 from CD-ROM
4) reinstall the backup software, and finally
5) restore from the tape backup using the Win 95 software

This seems like a lot of work to me.

I use a system that requires only two floppy diskettes and a Colorado tape
drive that plugs into the parallel port to rebuild the entire disk.

The first disk rebuilds the hard disk by updating the two boot sectors on
the hard disk from saved copies -- this removes boot viruses, repairs the
partition table, and can avoid the use of FDISK and formatting.  Often
times this will completely fix the computer.  Scandisk is then run to check
for errors.  If all looks okay the second disk is used, which contains the
files required to restore from tape.

The trick here is that I use D.J. Murdoch's program DOSLFNBK that backs up
and restores Win 95 long file names from a DOS prompt.  Once the tape is
restored, DOSLFNBK is run to restore the long file names and then Win 95 is
ready to run.    By using this program I avoid the steps of reinstalling
Win 95 and any Win 95 backup software.
(ftp://members.aol.com/wdaniel1/webpages/doslfn16.zip)

Feel free to email me if you have questions.

Bill Moseley
mailto:moseley at netcom.com