Tools for Backing Up Your Hard Drive - Ways of Transferring Data
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Prior to launching into any major job on your PC the prudent move is to run anti-virus programs on both PCs and to run your usual backup program just in case something goes wrong. Let's not forget our good friend Murphy: if something can go wrong, chances are it probably will.
Floppies: The simplest and cheapest way of transferring files over is to use floppies. But, as anyone who has used floppies recently will certify, this is painfully slow. The floppy drive is to a hard disk what a three legged zimmerframe is to an F-16. It also has highly limited storage space, and uses relatively large media - the contents of over a 100 floppies would fit in a thumbnail-size flash memory card - but don’t laugh just yet. The floppy is so ubiquitous that even now, 20 years after it’s debut, we can’t write it’s obituary. Brave motherboard manufacturers have launched models without legacy devices like floppy controllers - and lived to regret it, Abit’s IT7/AT7 motherboards are a case in point. Almost any new PC bought today is going to have this in common with any other PC bought in the last 20 years: The plucky, tenacious, but now anachronistic 3.5”, 1.44 MB, 360 rpm floppy disk drive.
Using floppies is cheap and undemanding – the drive is already present in both source and target PCs and the only other requirement is a few floppy disks. Disks are so cheap that whole boxes of them can be had for free at boot sales/garage sales. The drives themselves, if needed, cost under $10. Even the Microsoft Windows operating system isn’t required on the source PC! Any version of DOS and knowledge of one or two DOS commands will do the trick.
What if there are a few hundred files to be copied over, or the individual files exceed 1.44/2.88 MB? This will take a little more effort via floppies. Sure, if the files are only slightly bigger than the capacity available there are programs like Winzip, and for the files that don’t compress down to 1.44 MB there are file splitting programs that allow the spanning of a large file over several floppies. However, the typical computer user has thousands of small files and often has image/video files running into several GBs. The humble 3.5” will be woefully inadequate for them, and relying on it to transfer the data could keep a user busy long enough for Microsoft to release a bug free operating system.
DCC: If you have large volumes of data to transfer over there is no substitute for a fast data connection, and the Direct Cable Connection (DCC) is no substitute for a fast data connection. At speeds only marginally faster than a floppy drive it’s included here only for purposes of completeness. A DCC can use either a serial or parallel port and an appropriate cable to connect to a similar port on the other PC. A DCC gives anywhere from about 10 kbps to about 80 kbps depending on whether it’s a serial or parallel connection, roughly the speed of an inebriated snail. Newer ECP parallel ports, with the right cables, could give five times that speed, but even that is painfully slow.
Then there is the USB DCC connection which goes faster than a serial or parallel connection and provides up to 500 kbps (despite USB 2.0’s claim to fame being 240 Mbits/sec). That’s over two days to copy a 100 GB disk. But 500 kbps is a far cry from the floppy drive. So why isn’t DCC as popular as free beer? Maybe it’s the reputation it has for being a prima donna. 
DCC has a long list of demands. For starters both PCs need to have USB ports, a network needs to already exist on the target PC, the source PC needs Windows 95 (OSR 2.5) or later, the whole operation does require a special cable like a NET-LinQ (sic) - normal USB cables won’t work; and getting a DCC working via USB requires a fair amount of skill and patience. Though DCC obviates the need for network cards in both machines, it does involve all the configuring pallava of a network without the network speed advantages. DCC as a technology is as old as the floppy – if not older – but unlike the floppy it hasn’t held it’s popularity and is hardly ever seen as a credible alternate to a Local Area Network (LAN).
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