Before USB, the universal serial bus, the parallel port was the closest thing we had to a universal connection method. I had a handful of peripherals with parallel port connectors, for when all else failed. My personal favorite was the LapLink cable. Before Ethernet was ubiquitous, having a LapLink cable allowed one to connect two Windows computers using DCC (or Linux using PLIP), transfer files or anything else that could be done on a network. I used it a lot when I worked in a Token Ring shop.
I have a couple of HP COLORADO tape back drives, one is parralele and the other is EIDE, so internal. Only, a bit newer than the Ditto and can take larger capacity tapes. Took ages to back up, but there were for files only, documents, photos and that sort of thing. You back up when you are not using the machine at night. The same with the Ditto. I backed up all my computers on mine, via the network, worked great. I want to get the units back out and use them, well the internal one as i have no way of running the external one unless I get some sort of card with parallel connection . They were and still are reliable or as reliable as any other magnetic storage system. Tape drives are still sold and used, I know somone who still use tape drives to back things up. Great video.
Thanks for sharing. I knew about the Iomega Jaz and Zip drives, never knew about the Ditto drive. I had two Iomega Zip drives back in the day (which I still own) first parallel port then usb. I remember thinking wow 100MB what a lot of storage when compared to a standard floppy at 1.44MB. Alas today, that is a drip in the ocean. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
Thank you for making a lovely video. My iOmega story (everyone has one right lol) was about 20 years ago I was working as a tech guy for a timber firm. Even by then Zip drives were basically defunct. The company asked me to acquire a Zip drive from eBay as they wished to see some data stored on a few disks in the office, of which I did not know of the nature. I obliged, got it working via parallel interface on a Windows NT PC. Two weeks later a lady in the same office is arrested for embezzlement, charged, goes to court, and serves 3-6 months in jail... because of backed up data on those disks. It's not a lot to do with your video - just thought it was a good event to tell.
I owned a zip, then jaz, then ditto drive back in the 1990's while at university. The zip was awesome, the jazz was great, the ditto was decent. I dont remember it being that loud, but remember it being slow thanks to the parallel port. Brings back fond memories.
I used to deploy Colorado Backup parallel port 800MB travan drives for remote laptops I was supporting back then. It gave end users an easy way to make a full backup in about 20-30 minutes with just a few clicks when they were as far away as 4 hours from the main office. The compression algorithm was pretty good. CD Writers and inexpensive CD-Rs changed everything and made all this stuff obsolete.
> CD Writers and inexpensive CD-Rs changed everything and made all this stuff obsolete. Only for those who were clueless. Everyone else switched to DDS and DAT which blew CD and DVD out of the water for capacity, and DAT72 even can hold it's own against BD-R in capacity but not availability. These days we use LTO tapes, I'm upgrading my workplace to LTO8, 12-30TB per tape.
@dlarge6502 right well these were single users in the field where the closest office was 4 hours away who needed a quick archival backup. ON SERVERS we did use first DDS (wears out quick) and then later LTO .. I agree LTO is awesome, fast and reliable probably due to its mainframe heritage .. not cheap, we used until hard drives themselves started to outclass tape capacity.
A place I used to work at in the late 90s used tape drives for backup, although they were internal drives. I'm guessing SCSI, so probably quite a bit faster. I don't recall them being this loud, either. I will never complain about my external HGST backup drives again ;) It's quite fascinating to see all these iomega devices in action after all these years. The whole Zip drive thing kind of passed me by. Never had a use for them at the time of their heyday.
Still use tape? Sure I do. At work we archive data to LTO tapes. Currently a mix of everything from LTO1 to 6. We also have older DDS and DAT tapes of various capacities. I'm currently migrating the DDS and DAT tapes to a few spare LTO4 tapes we have. Just yesterday we ordered a new LTO 8 tape drive to help me migrate everything else upwards to LTO 8. Thats 30TB per tape compressed. At home I archive to BD-R but I backup that archive to LTO 3 tapes with a SCSI LTO4 drive. LTO 3 will do up to 800GB a tape compressed, but I backup stuff that doesn't compress well so I go usually with the native capacity of 400GB a tape. Over 35 or so years using computers from my C64 and its tapes in 1990 or so and my PC builds from 1996 onwards the most unreliable mediums I have ever come across has been HDD and today, flash. To be fair, vintage HDD's tend to work fine, I have many < 500MB 90's HDDs all seemly happy but they are very different beasts vs the stuff sine the 00's. I've been testing vintage drives at work for our legacy SCSI dataloggers and I have to say they are troopers, but the testing did kill a few. My history with HDD's since 2005 or so has been one of abject terror slowly increasing as the capacities go up. Still even though a 12TB HDD dying is as scary a prospect as me trapping a finger in a door, nothing beats the sheer terror all flash media give me. Since I saw that stuff come out I have watch it die in ways I never thought would even be allowed. I wont waffle on but I trust SSD less than I trust modern HDD and HDD less than optical. I've seen USB flash drives die, unused on a shelf only to never power up again, SD cards corrupt files as they are being written, new cards at that, and I have seen production POS systems, newly installed in a pub running win 10 off a SSD just wipe themselves overnight! I like *removable* media, that is data storage media that is separate from its drive. Should the drive muck itself up, I will just move the media to a new one. And yes I have a NAS, and this PC is running off a cheap chinese SSD salvaged from a laptop! Thats not the point. The data I keep, for decades, the data I want to read in another 30 years, is stored on media I know is readable in 30 years! At work ALL the DDS tapes from the 90's some as old as 1993/4 are: fine. The drives are, with a bit of a clean: fine. ALL the early 00's LTO tapes and drives I have touched at work are: fine, except for the ones that had a PSU issue but with a new PSU, they are fine. All my optical discs since 1997 are: fine. My optical drives, all fine, two had to have a tray loading belt replaced. I can say the same about record players, cassette players, my Commodore 1541 5.25" floppy drive, my TWO datassetes for my C64 ALL WORK FINE WITH A BIT OF TLC. But why is it I can count on TWO hands all my HDD and flash drive failures? Anyway, yeah. I'll keep using tape, others after me wont be able to access them, but thats fine as they are MY backup for the optical discs I make sure are accessible. I love tape and optical, oh and photographic film, I adore that stuff. Capacity is a problem, so I need to be smart and chose what actually needs saving. Eventually I'll not be able to get new optical recordable media, nobody will, even with new developments the "consumer" is being monetised and is expected to dumb ourselves down to the point we upload it to the clouds and forget about it. Eventually we wont even be able to buy a NAS. So enjoy offline, non-removable and removable media while it lasts!
Excellent point about removable media. If the drive fails, it's moveable to another drive. Well said. Even spinning HDDs can be recovered if the drive fails. SSDs, not so much. Excellent post.
"when tape was king" Err.. But tape is still king. I currently use an LTO 7 drive to back up all my streams and video projects, typically get around 5.9TB of media on a tape with a said 30 year storage life. Meanwhile enterprises uses tape everyday to backup their servers. The current LTO 9 tapes has a capacity of 18TB uncompressed data or 45TB (compressed) per cart.
Parallel port settings cut down transfer time considerably! Your parallel port should ALWAYS be set to "ECP" in BIOS! This should have been mentioned in this video. And yes, I have owned tape drives. "EPP" should be used for incompatibility issues(very rare).
I remember that circa 1995 or 1996 there was some company which marketed a device which enabled you to save lots of data (by the standard of the day) on a VHS tape. Backups and such. I would guess that it must have been some kind of a poor man's version of real tape cartridges like this one.
@@VintageElectronicsChannel I found this. Strange how I remembered this obscure technology even though it was such a long time ago. czcams.com/video/TUS0Zv2APjU/video.html
I recognise that Pavilion. I owned one of those back when they were new! I remember well than box of utter crapitude, and returning games back to the store because they wouldn't run with the pathetic Intel i810 shitset that sorry excuse for a computer used for graphics. And the time I tried to put a cup of tea on top only for it to fall off the pointlessly curved styling of the case. Yeah, that thing sucked. But it's what the family had back then. The volume knob on the keyboard was cool. Those were a novelty back then. Most of the other buttons stopped working after the first reformat and OS reinstall.
@@VintageElectronicsChannel And that why it ended up getting wiped and given a fresh Windows install. Unfortunately the bloatware included the keyboard software, but I never used those buttons anyway. I think it eventually became my first Linux PC, after the parents upgraded and gave me the hand-me-down to do as I pleased with. The graphics, though.... bad. Really bad. Not bad as in slow, but bad as in some games just wouldn't work right full stop - they ran with textures missing.
> keep away from any thing like this with rubber wheels in they go bad and soft True, but DDS/DATA also have that problem as they use pinch rollers. The rubber going hard is more common than going soft. With QIC tapes the biggest issues are with the rubber band, which does go soft like other bands and belts do. But replacing said belt in the tape cart will being it back to life. LTO tape however doesn't use a pichroller
Thanks for reminding me that I have dozens of 2120 taped that I never got around to transferring ...
Fantastic! I have a few Colorado drives in my systems that use the 2120 tapes. Tape drives are fun... and mostly reliable!
How did this channel not get recommened? Going to browse throufh the back catalogue!
Thanks for watching!
Before USB, the universal serial bus, the parallel port was the closest thing we had to a universal connection method. I had a handful of peripherals with parallel port connectors, for when all else failed. My personal favorite was the LapLink cable. Before Ethernet was ubiquitous, having a LapLink cable allowed one to connect two Windows computers using DCC (or Linux using PLIP), transfer files or anything else that could be done on a network. I used it a lot when I worked in a Token Ring shop.
CardBus was also pretty universal, but didn’t get enough support on PC desktops.
I have a couple of HP COLORADO tape back drives, one is parralele and the other is EIDE, so internal. Only, a bit newer than the Ditto and can take larger capacity tapes. Took ages to back up, but there were for files only, documents, photos and that sort of thing. You back up when you are not using the machine at night. The same with the Ditto. I backed up all my computers on mine, via the network, worked great.
I want to get the units back out and use them, well the internal one as i have no way of running the external one unless I get some sort of card with parallel connection . They were and still are reliable or as reliable as any other magnetic storage system. Tape drives are still sold and used, I know somone who still use tape drives to back things up.
Great video.
Thanks for watching! The comments on this video have actually sent me down a rabbit hole of modern tape backup systems.
Thanks for sharing. I knew about the Iomega Jaz and Zip drives, never knew about the Ditto drive. I had two Iomega Zip drives back in the day (which I still own) first parallel port then usb. I remember thinking wow 100MB what a lot of storage when compared to a standard floppy at 1.44MB. Alas today, that is a drip in the ocean.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
Thanks for watching!
Thank you for making a lovely video.
My iOmega story (everyone has one right lol) was about 20 years ago I was working as a tech guy for a timber firm. Even by then Zip drives were basically defunct. The company asked me to acquire a Zip drive from eBay as they wished to see some data stored on a few disks in the office, of which I did not know of the nature.
I obliged, got it working via parallel interface on a Windows NT PC. Two weeks later a lady in the same office is arrested for embezzlement, charged, goes to court, and serves 3-6 months in jail... because of backed up data on those disks.
It's not a lot to do with your video - just thought it was a good event to tell.
Sometimes backups can come back to haunt you. Lol
I owned a zip, then jaz, then ditto drive back in the 1990's while at university. The zip was awesome, the jazz was great, the ditto was decent. I dont remember it being that loud, but remember it being slow thanks to the parallel port. Brings back fond memories.
I used to deploy Colorado Backup parallel port 800MB travan drives for remote laptops I was supporting back then. It gave end users an easy way to make a full backup in about 20-30 minutes with just a few clicks when they were as far away as 4 hours from the main office. The compression algorithm was pretty good.
CD Writers and inexpensive CD-Rs changed everything and made all this stuff obsolete.
> CD Writers and inexpensive CD-Rs changed everything and made all this stuff obsolete.
Only for those who were clueless. Everyone else switched to DDS and DAT which blew CD and DVD out of the water for capacity, and DAT72 even can hold it's own against BD-R in capacity but not availability.
These days we use LTO tapes, I'm upgrading my workplace to LTO8, 12-30TB per tape.
@dlarge6502 right well these were single users in the field where the closest office was 4 hours away who needed a quick archival backup.
ON SERVERS we did use first DDS (wears out quick) and then later LTO .. I agree LTO is awesome, fast and reliable probably due to its mainframe heritage .. not cheap, we used until hard drives themselves started to outclass tape capacity.
A place I used to work at in the late 90s used tape drives for backup, although they were internal drives. I'm guessing SCSI, so probably quite a bit faster. I don't recall them being this loud, either. I will never complain about my external HGST backup drives again ;) It's quite fascinating to see all these iomega devices in action after all these years. The whole Zip drive thing kind of passed me by. Never had a use for them at the time of their heyday.
We used this in mid 2000's in the Navy.
I think I still have a box of the tapes someplace they threw away.
Still use tape? Sure I do.
At work we archive data to LTO tapes. Currently a mix of everything from LTO1 to 6. We also have older DDS and DAT tapes of various capacities.
I'm currently migrating the DDS and DAT tapes to a few spare LTO4 tapes we have. Just yesterday we ordered a new LTO 8 tape drive to help me migrate everything else upwards to LTO 8. Thats 30TB per tape compressed.
At home I archive to BD-R but I backup that archive to LTO 3 tapes with a SCSI LTO4 drive. LTO 3 will do up to 800GB a tape compressed, but I backup stuff that doesn't compress well so I go usually with the native capacity of 400GB a tape.
Over 35 or so years using computers from my C64 and its tapes in 1990 or so and my PC builds from 1996 onwards the most unreliable mediums I have ever come across has been HDD and today, flash.
To be fair, vintage HDD's tend to work fine, I have many < 500MB 90's HDDs all seemly happy but they are very different beasts vs the stuff sine the 00's. I've been testing vintage drives at work for our legacy SCSI dataloggers and I have to say they are troopers, but the testing did kill a few. My history with HDD's since 2005 or so has been one of abject terror slowly increasing as the capacities go up.
Still even though a 12TB HDD dying is as scary a prospect as me trapping a finger in a door, nothing beats the sheer terror all flash media give me. Since I saw that stuff come out I have watch it die in ways I never thought would even be allowed. I wont waffle on but I trust SSD less than I trust modern HDD and HDD less than optical.
I've seen USB flash drives die, unused on a shelf only to never power up again, SD cards corrupt files as they are being written, new cards at that, and I have seen production POS systems, newly installed in a pub running win 10 off a SSD just wipe themselves overnight!
I like *removable* media, that is data storage media that is separate from its drive. Should the drive muck itself up, I will just move the media to a new one.
And yes I have a NAS, and this PC is running off a cheap chinese SSD salvaged from a laptop! Thats not the point. The data I keep, for decades, the data I want to read in another 30 years, is stored on media I know is readable in 30 years! At work ALL the DDS tapes from the 90's some as old as 1993/4 are: fine. The drives are, with a bit of a clean: fine. ALL the early 00's LTO tapes and drives I have touched at work are: fine, except for the ones that had a PSU issue but with a new PSU, they are fine.
All my optical discs since 1997 are: fine. My optical drives, all fine, two had to have a tray loading belt replaced. I can say the same about record players, cassette players, my Commodore 1541 5.25" floppy drive, my TWO datassetes for my C64 ALL WORK FINE WITH A BIT OF TLC.
But why is it I can count on TWO hands all my HDD and flash drive failures?
Anyway, yeah. I'll keep using tape, others after me wont be able to access them, but thats fine as they are MY backup for the optical discs I make sure are accessible. I love tape and optical, oh and photographic film, I adore that stuff. Capacity is a problem, so I need to be smart and chose what actually needs saving. Eventually I'll not be able to get new optical recordable media, nobody will, even with new developments the "consumer" is being monetised and is expected to dumb ourselves down to the point we upload it to the clouds and forget about it.
Eventually we wont even be able to buy a NAS. So enjoy offline, non-removable and removable media while it lasts!
Excellent point about removable media. If the drive fails, it's moveable to another drive. Well said. Even spinning HDDs can be recovered if the drive fails. SSDs, not so much. Excellent post.
Oh boy, I had one of those I used for backups, man was it slow. it also would eat the tapes on a regular basis, and was a waste of money.
"when tape was king"
Err.. But tape is still king. I currently use an LTO 7 drive to back up all my streams and video projects, typically get around 5.9TB of media on a tape with a said 30 year storage life. Meanwhile enterprises uses tape everyday to backup their servers. The current LTO 9 tapes has a capacity of 18TB uncompressed data or 45TB (compressed) per cart.
Parallel port settings cut down transfer time considerably! Your parallel port should ALWAYS be set to "ECP" in BIOS! This should have been mentioned in this video. And yes, I have owned tape drives. "EPP" should be used for incompatibility issues(very rare).
I'll have to check to see what my settings are on that. Didn't even check.
I remember that circa 1995 or 1996 there was some company which marketed a device which enabled you to save lots of data (by the standard of the day) on a VHS tape. Backups and such. I would guess that it must have been some kind of a poor man's version of real tape cartridges like this one.
Danmere was the company, I believe. It converted digital signal to video. Pretty ingenious.
@@VintageElectronicsChannel I found this. Strange how I remembered this obscure technology even though it was such a long time ago.
czcams.com/video/TUS0Zv2APjU/video.html
I owned the Danmere Backer32 back in the day 😀
The packaging is impressively plastic free for a 1990s electronic device
Recycling isn't a new thing.
I recognise that Pavilion. I owned one of those back when they were new! I remember well than box of utter crapitude, and returning games back to the store because they wouldn't run with the pathetic Intel i810 shitset that sorry excuse for a computer used for graphics. And the time I tried to put a cup of tea on top only for it to fall off the pointlessly curved styling of the case. Yeah, that thing sucked. But it's what the family had back then.
The volume knob on the keyboard was cool. Those were a novelty back then. Most of the other buttons stopped working after the first reformat and OS reinstall.
It's definitely underwhelming. Performance isn't great and all the included bloatware doesn't help.
@@VintageElectronicsChannel And that why it ended up getting wiped and given a fresh Windows install. Unfortunately the bloatware included the keyboard software, but I never used those buttons anyway.
I think it eventually became my first Linux PC, after the parents upgraded and gave me the hand-me-down to do as I pleased with.
The graphics, though.... bad. Really bad. Not bad as in slow, but bad as in some games just wouldn't work right full stop - they ran with textures missing.
The “D” word if I never hear those three letters ever again it’ll be too soon
hi keep away from any thing like this with rubber wheels in they go bad and soft have had it the rest of the later decks like dat 8 mm 1/2 inch are ok
> keep away from any thing like this with rubber wheels in they go bad and soft
True, but DDS/DATA also have that problem as they use pinch rollers.
The rubber going hard is more common than going soft. With QIC tapes the biggest issues are with the rubber band, which does go soft like other bands and belts do. But replacing said belt in the tape cart will being it back to life.
LTO tape however doesn't use a pichroller
Would be quicker to backup to the cloud lol.
So noisy
It has old bearings, you should hear an old screeching HDD