Product Reviews

Hard disk sizes are constantly on the increase. Hard drives with 6Gb or more, at under £300, are now available, and backing up that lot with a 250Mb Jumbo is just not on.

Travan TR-4 tape drives can be had for about £225, and DDS-2 DAT drives for just over £500, so Microsolutions' TR-4 parallel port drive seems expensive at £391, with portability the only extra feature.

The drive itself is well built. The power supply is external and is of the type where the PSU itself is moulded into the plug. The only indicators on the front of the drive are activity and power LEDs, and the back of the drive has the power switch, connectors to the PC and a passthrough printer port.

TR-4 tapes offer 4Gb capacity without compression, and a notional 8Gb using 2:1 compression, which is rarely achieved in reality. The complete kit includes a TR-4 cartridge, cables and Seagate Backup Exec software for Windows 95, Windows 3.11 and DOS on a single CD.

Backups made under the Windows 3.11 and DOS systems are interchangeable with full read/write capability. The Windows 95 software can read tapes written by the other two but can't write to them, and neither DOS nor Windows 3.11 versions can read Windows 95 tapes. Using the drive to move data between systems could be limited

Installation is simple: plug the drive in, install the MicroSolutions parallel port driver from floppy and then the required version of the Seagate software from CD. I didn't have any problems, but if you do, the only help with solving parallel port issues is buried in a README file on the floppy, with the manual itself being minimalist.

MicroSolutions claims the drive can manage 30Mb/min, though 'actual speed is dependent on host PC'. My tests were on a Pentium 166 with a late model Gigabyte HX motherboard, 40Mb of EDO RAM and a Fujitsu 2.5Gb hard drive. The drive was defragmented prior to tests. The parallel port was an ECP/EPP v1.9. Even so, I found speed varied from about 15Mb to 21Mb/mine, depending on exactly what was being backed up. The drive certainly spent time hacking back and forth and did not stream smoothly. Backing up the whole drive (771Mb) took 43 minutes and ten seconds. This averages out at 17.7Mb/min.

The Seagate software provided is competent and probably the most widely used non-server backup software in the world. The interface is simple to use and has most of the desired features. But the version of the Seagate software supplied for Windows 95 (1.15) is out of date. The latest version (2) can create a recovery disk which can boot the PC, load the necessary drivers, and run a simple recovery utility which will restore the drive in one step.

The Backpack is a competent high-capacity, but relatively slow, backup solution. Upgrading the software to give the recovery option is strongly recommended, but otherwise the Backpack is well built and well featured. There are faster and cheaper non-portable solutions available such as Seagate's internal EIDE TR-4 drive at £215, but if you need portability the Backpack is a good, reasonable buy with a large capacity.