I'm pretty sure that the molex power connector on the card is only needed to support an external drive. That is likely because an external drive doesn't have a separate power supply. But as you you showed the internal drive has it's own power connection to the PC power supply.
Ahh the joys of turning up to a client who had accidentally deleted vital data only to find either they had not been putting the nightly backup tape in the drive so the last known good backup was so old as to be useless or the tapes with the required data on them would no longer read ! Quite liked the Colorado software but much preferred Veritas "backup exec" Excellent video !
Thank you!! I have a sad story with tape drives... prior to leaving for an extended excursion, I started an "erase" on a tape that had valid backups on it... this was for my Dad. Well, I got busy and forgot to do another backup. A few weeks later, the laptop got stolen. EEK! I felt pretty bad. Given that was over 20 years ago, I guess he has recovered from it. He's here visiting today, so I best not bring it up! Thanks for watching!!
Great video ... love these tape backup systems. My first 486 also had one and couple of months ago picked up a nice boxed one ... But never got around to try it out yet ... too many projects and too little time
I had a floppy-based Travan tape drive in a Packard Bell Legend 994CDT... pretty sure it used 1.6GB tapes. The tape controller was fried, but getting it to work on the normal floppy interface with Windows 98's backup program was amusing nonetheless. I really think tape drives need to come back to the consumer market someday. Being able to back up so much to a few affordable Ultrium cartridges is exactly what I'd want, and it seems viable with M.2 PCIe SSDs being widely available alongside hard drives continuing to get faster. Too bad new tape drives are super pricey, but maybe in the future I might consider getting another used one and using LTFS.
Good points! I just bought a 4TB SSD to store raw videos on that I make for the channel... and boy was that expensive!! Could've gone with cloud storage, but I like to keep data on premises too. A tape drive would have been more cost effective than the 4TB SSD... especially since I don't need instant access to past raw video!
@@RetroTechChris The SSD should go great with a tape drive, given the former will be able to feed tons of data to the tape drive very rapidly. Newer generations of LTO expect very high transfer rates in order for the mechanism to coast along, otherwise the tape drive will have to keep stopping when its buffer drains and rewind a tad bit before starting again... a "shoeshining" effect, so to speak.
@@RetroTechChris Im currently working on getting a tape drive to work with a macintosh server and retro spect. I all ready have dds working on mac os 10.5 im working on getting system 7.5 to run with one soon to.
Back in the day when I had a 486 with a 200 meg hard drive, I got one of those tape drives to store all my ... err ... "backups" on. My other PC owning friend also had one and we found them much quicker to use than a null modem cable for transferring data between our machines. Used it for several years until CD-R drives became affordable. I used the DOS tools to work with the tape. At one point I had some drivers that gave the tape drive a drive letter in Windows, it was so slow 😂
I'm very surprised this was on OS/2! I used to get paid to go to customer sites and perform tape backups. I imagine that before we are dead we won't have cars anymore. Wild!
This will be quick- when we had the novel server in @ 1992-1997 we had a IT company come in every week and burn a image from novell to a backup machine, then basically burn a backup to a set of CD's - i cant recall 2 or 3 cd's worth, the tech would come over ensure the over batch file had run, start the copy process, leave and come back 3 hours later, check the logs, pop the cdrom out and check it on another machine, then say good buy - i recall he said it was $300 a weekly visit, i was in the city and he mentioned he had about 20 customers in walking distance that he "multitasked" 6k a a week in mid 90's Regards George
Just fished out a Colorado Tape Backup Drive I last used in September 2001. I still have the tapes so hope to see what I was up to all that time ago, that is when I've fitted into into an old Computer I have. Just hope it still works. Like the video.
Thanks for doing this video. I have an old Colorado 120mb Tape Drive, and I'd like to see if I can hook it up to my old 386 and restore what is on the tapes. Have you done a video on how to clean the drive and prep the tapes after so many years? Keep up the good work!
Thanks! I haven't read up much on the subject, but for cleaning the heads, I just used a Q-Tip with alcohol. As far as prepping the tape, not sure if you'd have to do anything there. I used some new old stock tapes and they seemed to work ok!
@@RetroTechChris Well, you've inspired me to hook my old tape drive back up and restore my old tapes. But now that I'm looking at it...I don't recall how to hook it up. It has a long ribbon cable, and it looks like the existing floppy cable plugs into the one provided by Colorado. It isn't clear to me if it's just going to piggy back, or if I need to unplug my secondary floppy. (I don't have the FC-20 card). Any advice?
@@mk553 it'll piggy back, you can have two FDDs in the system. However, I do see a FC-20 with a Colorado 1400 on eBay for about $30 bucks shipped in the US!!
@@RetroTechChris Thanks for the help! Well, I bought a new-old stock tape, and that worked just fine. Formatted it, made a small backup, restore, all good. So I felt confident enough to put in some of my 30 year old tapes. It ate every one of them. Oh well, it was fun to try anyway. :)
i have been carrying this tape drive around for even decades. (Colorado memory systems Jumbe 250 certified circa 1995. ) I would l love to have the information copied onto a thumb drive. Any ideas?
In 1995 I was working in Denver and my employer gave me a MS DOS 486 computer. I asked for a “Colorado Backup lite” be included. As I was leaving I put everything on my computer onto a tape. I am curious about this tape but there is no real concern and certainly no liability to yourself. If you have the hardware/software. It should not take more than a few minutes to read it and copy it onto a thumb drive. If there are problems, then ‘oh well’. In any event you can have the tape. The tape says ‘Colorado memory systems Preformatted QIC 80’ I have a TH-cam channel th-cam.com/users/mrphysh contact me through that?
I have a Colorado 120MB Internal Tape Drive (edge connector). I have DC 2120 tapes with data on them. How do I get my BIOS to recognize the tape drive? How can the system see the drive if the BIOS doesn't see it first? I'm using K7N2 Delta motherboard with the on-board floppy controller.
Great video Chris; I just watched it! Do you mind me asking what PC you were using this hardware on? I live in Colorado, so it was interesting to see that this subsidiary of HP was based up in Loveland!😊
Hi All, Nice video Chris Now for the bad news, i totally hate tape drives - did they get me out of trouble, well yeah 2/3/4 times. Why Well at one place i was Mr Backup, and i had my tower of tapes, Mon/Tue/Wed/Thur. Friday Week1, Friday Week2, Friday Week3, Friday Week 4, EOM Jan, Feb....Dec Every morning, i would come in, make a coffee, walk upstairs, drop my bag at my desk, walk to the server and remove last nights tape and swap it with tonight's one. The reliability was hit and miss, and maybe 1 on 3 restores was good, it all ranged from dust, bad writes or false verify's, stretched tape and every other issue the external IT could think of. In @ 2005-2010 our HP server had the tape unit changed under warranty but they gave us a newer one that took different tapes, the owner was annoyed that the replacement unit only was not covered and we had to pay for new media - worst was the fact that all the old backup were not readable as we did not have a reader and some "vital stuff" required the IT contractor to come and take the tape back to the shop and try and restore of a machine he had at his shop. Worst still was some time the owner would come to my table and say " the tape is not in the machine" i would go over and see it out, luckily i had changed it as it had "todays markings on the sticker" - i push it in sit there with him and wait, all looks good, it has rewound and set itself up, then we walk away, then every so often he would have a look at say before or after lunch time and say - "its out" - what do you do - i had about 3 spares that i penciled on a date, but what do you do with a tape that ejects, is it the media or the mechanism or the software. Eventually i convinced him that we should use some older PC's 386/486 back then with a decent large drive and set up a batch file that xcopy certain directories into a backup, luckily it was all date driven, the batch file got the date variable and used that to create a directory under backup, then xcopy all changed files ( based on the -a attribute ). Other than media, i had issues with some files, as this was a construction company and the r: drive was the works in progress and billing spreadsheets, some times, people would make a change to a file, that was saved, but a few people would make changes and all of a sudden you are trying to get a correct prior version, but Mon/Tue/Wed is wrong, and last weeks Friday is wrong , the Friday before or EOM is to old. I ended up making a A3 monthly calendar and advising what was saved, so if the last correct was say last wednesday week it is now gone as the daily since then is wrong as is the weekly friday, and the friday before that correct but to old and not updated enough( as is prior monthlys) So that is why we went to a separate PC with hard drive daily based altered file - not perfect but good, i still ran the tapes because of audit requirements, then i had to store all tapes of site - my house - not happy, and yes it was a 45 min drive work to home - i did forget at times to rotate tapes but had 2 spares in my drawer at work that were ad-hock - penciled in dates. The older dos days were better, Attache accounts had a back up function to 2 then 3 floppies, and important stuff went to a zip drive 100meg for sales program, and a different 100meg floppy for user files, we did upgrade to the 250 meg but still ran 2 different storage floppies - i have to admit the media is 100% more reliable than the storage drives. But by 2005 and XP we were burning cd's, they still had issues with overrun / under-run burn errors, but the files were transferred from a server to normal pc after hours and then burnt to cd/dvd These days there is a 7pm backup to our cloud so every man and his dog can hack and access it Regards George
I should show you the original version of this video!! It got scrapped because the lighting was bad... but I ended up having to clean the tape drive with a Q tip and alcohol to get rid of errors. I was shocked at how reliable this was, because, ya, like you have experienced, I have seen the same thing... tape drives, especially consumer grade, seemed to have a high failure and defect rate!!
@RetroTechChris thanks for the link. My employer about 30 years ago, provided software and systems to pharmacies. I setup a lot of new Dell machines, installed ethernet cards, and Colorado tape drives using the floppy controller. Then loaded novel on them and get them talking to each other. Someone else loaded the companies product on the machines before they got delivered. One day I learned they were pirating the novel netware and I promptly quit. (They got in trouble) but I didn't turn them in
I'm pretty sure that the molex power connector on the card is only needed to support an external drive. That is likely because an external drive doesn't have a separate power supply. But as you you showed the internal drive has it's own power connection to the PC power supply.
Yea, if memory serves, that seems right to me! Thanks for watching!
Ahh the joys of turning up to a client who had accidentally deleted vital data only to find either they had not been putting the nightly backup tape in the drive so the last known good backup was so old as to be useless or the tapes with the required data on them would no longer read !
Quite liked the Colorado software but much preferred Veritas "backup exec"
Excellent video !
Thank you!! I have a sad story with tape drives... prior to leaving for an extended excursion, I started an "erase" on a tape that had valid backups on it... this was for my Dad. Well, I got busy and forgot to do another backup. A few weeks later, the laptop got stolen. EEK! I felt pretty bad. Given that was over 20 years ago, I guess he has recovered from it. He's here visiting today, so I best not bring it up! Thanks for watching!!
Great video ... love these tape backup systems. My first 486 also had one and couple of months ago picked up a nice boxed one ... But never got around to try it out yet ... too many projects and too little time
Thank you! I can relate with having too many projects, the backlog keeps growing too!
Great stuff Chris!
Oh my, we must have had so much more life left to waste, back in the day! :)
Time marches on for sure!! But we're keeping the retro scene alive here :-) Thanks for watching!!
I had a floppy-based Travan tape drive in a Packard Bell Legend 994CDT... pretty sure it used 1.6GB tapes. The tape controller was fried, but getting it to work on the normal floppy interface with Windows 98's backup program was amusing nonetheless. I really think tape drives need to come back to the consumer market someday. Being able to back up so much to a few affordable Ultrium cartridges is exactly what I'd want, and it seems viable with M.2 PCIe SSDs being widely available alongside hard drives continuing to get faster. Too bad new tape drives are super pricey, but maybe in the future I might consider getting another used one and using LTFS.
Good points! I just bought a 4TB SSD to store raw videos on that I make for the channel... and boy was that expensive!! Could've gone with cloud storage, but I like to keep data on premises too. A tape drive would have been more cost effective than the 4TB SSD... especially since I don't need instant access to past raw video!
@@RetroTechChris The SSD should go great with a tape drive, given the former will be able to feed tons of data to the tape drive very rapidly. Newer generations of LTO expect very high transfer rates in order for the mechanism to coast along, otherwise the tape drive will have to keep stopping when its buffer drains and rewind a tad bit before starting again... a "shoeshining" effect, so to speak.
@@RetroTechChris Im currently working on getting a tape drive to work with a macintosh server and retro spect. I all ready have dds working on mac os 10.5 im working on getting system 7.5 to run with one soon to.
@@stpworld that's great!!
Back in the day when I had a 486 with a 200 meg hard drive, I got one of those tape drives to store all my ... err ... "backups" on. My other PC owning friend also had one and we found them much quicker to use than a null modem cable for transferring data between our machines. Used it for several years until CD-R drives became affordable. I used the DOS tools to work with the tape. At one point I had some drivers that gave the tape drive a drive letter in Windows, it was so slow 😂
Haha... hey, this is a judgment-free zone here! Ya.. I think I used a tape drive as a drive letter too once!!
I remember selling that to a customer. Once I did that. I tried to push them to all customers. Not that they would take. Up until IDE drives came out.
They are such cool little devices!!
I'm very surprised this was on OS/2! I used to get paid to go to customer sites and perform tape backups. I imagine that before we are dead we won't have cars anymore. Wild!
Times keep a-changing for sure!!
This will be quick- when we had the novel server in @ 1992-1997 we had a IT company come in every week and burn a image from novell to a backup machine, then basically burn a backup to a set of CD's - i cant recall 2 or 3 cd's worth, the tech would come over ensure the over batch file had run, start the copy process, leave and come back 3 hours later, check the logs, pop the cdrom out and check it on another machine, then say good buy - i recall he said it was $300 a weekly visit, i was in the city and he mentioned he had about 20 customers in walking distance that he "multitasked" 6k a a week in mid 90's
Regards
George
Now there's a job for ya!!
I had a Jumbo drive in those days. I could run it at full speed without such a card because my floppy drive controller supported 2.88Mb floppy drives.
Interesting! Wasn't aware of that. Thanks for sharing.
Just fished out a Colorado Tape Backup Drive I last used in September 2001. I still have the tapes so hope to see what I was up to all that time ago, that is when I've fitted into into an old Computer I have. Just hope it still works. Like the video.
Thank you! That's great to hear!! Thanks for watching.
@@RetroTechChris The pleasures all mine, I really enjoyed the video and the chance to learn something new. My drive just fits to the floppy - I hope.
@@shamteal8614 I imagine it does!
@@RetroTechChris I'll let you know.
@@shamteal8614 I look forward to hearing how it goes for you!!
Keep the content coming! I'm really enjoying your videos. :-)
Thank you! That is really good to hear. Thanks for watching!!
Thanks for doing this video. I have an old Colorado 120mb Tape Drive, and I'd like to see if I can hook it up to my old 386 and restore what is on the tapes. Have you done a video on how to clean the drive and prep the tapes after so many years? Keep up the good work!
Thanks! I haven't read up much on the subject, but for cleaning the heads, I just used a Q-Tip with alcohol. As far as prepping the tape, not sure if you'd have to do anything there. I used some new old stock tapes and they seemed to work ok!
@@RetroTechChris Well, you've inspired me to hook my old tape drive back up and restore my old tapes. But now that I'm looking at it...I don't recall how to hook it up. It has a long ribbon cable, and it looks like the existing floppy cable plugs into the one provided by Colorado. It isn't clear to me if it's just going to piggy back, or if I need to unplug my secondary floppy. (I don't have the FC-20 card). Any advice?
@@mk553 it'll piggy back, you can have two FDDs in the system. However, I do see a FC-20 with a Colorado 1400 on eBay for about $30 bucks shipped in the US!!
@@RetroTechChris Thanks for the help! Well, I bought a new-old stock tape, and that worked just fine. Formatted it, made a small backup, restore, all good. So I felt confident enough to put in some of my 30 year old tapes. It ate every one of them. Oh well, it was fun to try anyway. :)
@@mk553 oh no! There might not have been much that could be done there then... the tapes may have degraded sadly. Sorry to hear that.
i have been carrying this tape drive around for even decades. (Colorado memory systems Jumbe 250 certified circa 1995. ) I would l love to have the information copied onto a thumb drive. Any ideas?
Confused.. do you have a tape, a drive, or both?
it was made on a MS DOS 486 .
@@mrphysh so you have a tape? If you mailed it to me, I'd be wiling to try and read it, but no guarantees!
In 1995 I was working in Denver and my employer gave me a MS DOS 486 computer. I asked for a “Colorado Backup lite” be included. As I was leaving I put everything on my computer onto a tape. I am curious about this tape but there is no real concern and certainly no liability to yourself. If you have the hardware/software. It should not take more than a few minutes to read it and copy it onto a thumb drive. If there are problems, then ‘oh well’. In any event you can have the tape.
The tape says ‘Colorado memory systems Preformatted QIC 80’
I have a TH-cam channel
th-cam.com/users/mrphysh
contact me through that?
Do you want to sell that thing man? I need one of those tape drives
I have a Colorado 120MB Internal Tape Drive (edge connector). I have DC 2120 tapes with data on them. How do I get my BIOS to recognize the tape drive? How can the system see the drive if the BIOS doesn't see it first? I'm using K7N2 Delta motherboard with the on-board floppy controller.
Hey there! The BIOS won't see it, but the tape backup software will! Does that help?
@@RetroTechChris Awesome, thanks! I always thought BIOS had to see everything!
Great video Chris; I just watched it! Do you mind me asking what PC you were using this hardware on? I live in Colorado, so it was interesting to see that this subsidiary of HP was based up in Loveland!😊
Hey there! This drive was originally installed in the Gateway 2000 486 tower you see there in the video! I purchased this retro PC a few years back!
Hi All, Nice video Chris
Now for the bad news, i totally hate tape drives - did they get me out of trouble, well yeah 2/3/4 times.
Why
Well at one place i was Mr Backup, and i had my tower of tapes, Mon/Tue/Wed/Thur. Friday Week1, Friday Week2, Friday Week3, Friday Week 4, EOM Jan, Feb....Dec
Every morning, i would come in, make a coffee, walk upstairs, drop my bag at my desk, walk to the server and remove last nights tape and swap it with tonight's one.
The reliability was hit and miss, and maybe 1 on 3 restores was good, it all ranged from dust, bad writes or false verify's, stretched tape and every other issue the external IT could think of.
In @ 2005-2010 our HP server had the tape unit changed under warranty but they gave us a newer one that took different tapes, the owner was annoyed that the replacement unit only was not covered and we had to pay for new media - worst was the fact that all the old backup were not readable as we did not have a reader and some "vital stuff" required the IT contractor to come and take the tape back to the shop and try and restore of a machine he had at his shop.
Worst still was some time the owner would come to my table and say " the tape is not in the machine" i would go over and see it out, luckily i had changed it as it had "todays markings on the sticker" - i push it in sit there with him and wait, all looks good, it has rewound and set itself up, then we walk away, then every so often he would have a look at say before or after lunch time and say - "its out" - what do you do - i had about 3 spares that i penciled on a date, but what do you do with a tape that ejects, is it the media or the mechanism or the software.
Eventually i convinced him that we should use some older PC's 386/486 back then with a decent large drive and set up a batch file that xcopy certain directories into a backup, luckily it was all date driven, the batch file got the date variable and used that to create a directory under backup, then xcopy all changed files ( based on the -a attribute ).
Other than media, i had issues with some files, as this was a construction company and the r: drive was the works in progress and billing spreadsheets, some times, people would make a change to a file, that was saved, but a few people would make changes and all of a sudden you are trying to get a correct prior version, but Mon/Tue/Wed is wrong, and last weeks Friday is wrong , the Friday before or EOM is to old.
I ended up making a A3 monthly calendar and advising what was saved, so if the last correct was say last wednesday week it is now gone as the daily since then is wrong as is the weekly friday, and the friday before that correct but to old and not updated enough( as is prior monthlys)
So that is why we went to a separate PC with hard drive daily based altered file - not perfect but good, i still ran the tapes because of audit requirements, then i had to store all tapes of site - my house - not happy, and yes it was a 45 min drive work to home - i did forget at times to rotate tapes but had 2 spares in my drawer at work that were ad-hock - penciled in dates.
The older dos days were better, Attache accounts had a back up function to 2 then 3 floppies, and important stuff went to a zip drive 100meg for sales program, and a different 100meg floppy for user files, we did upgrade to the 250 meg but still ran 2 different storage floppies - i have to admit the media is 100% more reliable than the storage drives.
But by 2005 and XP we were burning cd's, they still had issues with overrun / under-run burn errors, but the files were transferred from a server to normal pc after hours and then burnt to cd/dvd
These days there is a 7pm backup to our cloud so every man and his dog can hack and access it
Regards
George
I should show you the original version of this video!! It got scrapped because the lighting was bad... but I ended up having to clean the tape drive with a Q tip and alcohol to get rid of errors. I was shocked at how reliable this was, because, ya, like you have experienced, I have seen the same thing... tape drives, especially consumer grade, seemed to have a high failure and defect rate!!
This video even had a villain and yes I do mean that electrolytic capacitor :-D
Oh yeah!! A villan in waiting there!!! Haha!
I need a Colorado backup tape dr. Can somebody possibly tell me how to get one
eBay?
Yeah but I don't know if I can trust that that's the problem
@@Joseph-ln2em can you provide a little more context?
I feel cheated
..I wanted to hear it run! I installed a lot of these back in the day
I've got you covered! See here!! x.com/RetroTechChris/status/1743292530895003843
@RetroTechChris thanks for the link. My employer about 30 years ago, provided software and systems to pharmacies. I setup a lot of new Dell machines, installed ethernet cards, and Colorado tape drives using the floppy controller. Then loaded novel on them and get them talking to each other. Someone else loaded the companies product on the machines before they got delivered. One day I learned they were pirating the novel netware and I promptly quit. (They got in trouble) but I didn't turn them in
@@lestersegelhorst2776 haha, oh my! By the way, I have several Novell NetWare videos here on the channel!
What happens at 7?
Huh?
Can you call 3M and record it just for the heck of it? :)
I think that may be a good idea!!!
IRQ 6, DMA 2... Oh hey, it's a floppy controller.
Pretty much!!
To be fair, that could have been 30th September 2096. I say try your luck ;)
Ooh! I like the way you think :) :) Hopefully folks enjoy the bit I did there... I try to keep things entertaining!!