NWA-PCUG Newsletter Article
Zip Drives and More Of That Ilk....
by Betty Davis, Vice President - October 97
bpake@juno.com
(click to email author)


I just wanted to share a few of my adventures with my new Zip drive. It might be of help to those of you who have one and haven't been able to use it to its best advantage.

I'm sure that those of you who are seasoned veterans could have done this in a lot faster and simpler way, but most of the time I still don't know what I'm doing. Beginners, take heart! There is hope, even if it's hard to find sometimes.

I had a Zip drive installed in my upgrade with the idea that I would be able to do a full backup without spending an evening going through about 60 floppies, plus another 28 for a differential backup later.

The only problem was that it didn't work for that purpose. One Zip disk would fill and that was it....there was no way to get the second disk to copy files in sequence. I will admit that in the information from the manufacturer, nothing is said about a full backup. It mentions copying long files to free up space on your hard disk, etc. OK, then it was my problem. What to do?

I had a vague recollection of a Question and Answer in PC Novice magazine about this, so I devoted a few hours going through back issues until I found it. It involved using DOS' XCOPY command with the caveat, "you won't get any compression and it won't run as fast as a real backup utility, but at least you'll know that you have a set of Zip diskettes containing a total, organized copy of your hard drive".

It was a possible solution, but it didn't sound like something that would really thrill me. However, when you're drowning, don't sneer at a floating log.

I happened to mention this dilemma to an e-mail buddy in San Antonio and he said just go to the Iomega home page (http://www.iomega.com) and download a file they have available to correct my little glitch.

No problem! Found the home page and found the file....BUT there was a warning to download it to a disk because this was not a "safe" page and it gave a virus warning. OK, I can appreciate that.

I didn't have regular virus protection software so I thought this would be a good time to get that going. I went to the BBS and downloaded the McAfee software program, which I then had to unzip. (Of course, all of this was with coaching from Bill Shook.)

So with McAfee software in place, I started the download to disk from Iomega. Only problem was that if there was information somewhere about the size of the file, I missed it. I used a 3.5 floppy and when the first one was filled it wouldn't accept the second. It was a 2 meg file. The next sound was that of a hand slapping forehead. Of course! Use a Zip disk. After the second twenty minute download session I had the disk safely secured, and ran the McAfee virus check on the disk. It was fine.

Then it was just a question of copying it to the Tools_95 directory. (It took me awhile to figure out that was where it was, rather than in an Iomega directory). Downhill all the way! With a certain amount of apprehension I started running the backup and it worked like a charm. When One Zip disk was filled, it prompted me to insert another, and I now have a complete backup on about three and a half disks. It was a real joy.

See? Computers can be a lot of fun....if someone hides all the hammers.

Click here to return to top



==================================================================