Wally Dug's Hard Cases 5: Tape Streaming Device

Back-up your hard drive onto a video tape? Wally Dug shows a cheap way to do just that.

A hard drive is a great thing to have as it makes the loading of programs an absolute doddle.

A hard drive is a great thing to have as it allows you to operate vast programs such as Professional Page and CanDo with ease.

A hard drive is a great thing to have as it lets you keep all associated files together in the same place.

A hard drive is a real scunner when it crashes.

To all you hard drive owners sitting at home laughing to yourself, "Ha, ha! Wally's hard drive crashed on him!", I will ask you to read that last paragraph again. When it crashes, not if.

Man has always been inquisitive - Where did I come from? Where am I going? What is my purpose here in life? Why has my hard drive suddenly developed read/write errors on all four partitions?

A hard disk has exactly the same make-up as a floppy disk - a little piece of magnetically-coated disc going round and round and round. The only difference is that with a hard drive living inside a long vacuum box (i.e. the opposite of an upright Hoover), it can spin round faster and hold a lot more data. How many of you had a favourite games disk that you always loaded when you had five minutes to spare until you saw that dreaded requester - Volume x has a read/write error? A hard drive is exactly the same.

So we now know that there is no protection from a hard drive crash, but surely there must be some form of preventative measures that we can take? Well, yes, there is. (And don't call me Shirley.) There are many hard drive back-up utilities in both the freely distributable and commercial sectors of the market - indeed, Workbench 2.0 brought HDBackup to the masses (no sniggering, please). But there are two slight problems.

Problem One is the number of floppy disks that you need to back-up your hard drive which is approximately one floppy disk per one megabyte of disk space on your drive.

Problem Two is that you need to stay at your machine for what seems like ages while you feed it all these floppies one-by-one-by-one-by-one.

You can buy tape streaming devices that allow you to back-up your data onto the one cassette without any swaps whatsoever. However, in many cases, this method costs about twice as much as a similar capacity hard drive would. At least, it used to until I developed my very own tape streaming device!

The usual words of warning apply - if you adjust your Amiga in this way, you may just end up being fast forwarded and put in a case yourself.

Required:

VHS or Super-VHS VCR (it must have a SCART socket)
Blank video cassette
Amiga to SCART cable
3 metre serial cable (Tandy ref. 3M SERIAL CABLE)
Plastic strip wire connector, twelve strip variety (Tandy ref. 12 PLASTIC STRIP WIRE CONNECTOR)
Irn Bru chews
Sharp knife

Method:

Plug the serial cable into the Amiga.
Plug the SCART cable into the VCR (see Figure 1).
Very carefully, cut the spare end off the serial cable (if you have any fears, ask a child to help you with the knife) (see Figure 2).
Very carefully, cut the spare end off the SCART cable (if you have any fears, ask a child to help you with the knife) (see Figure 3).
By using the plastic strip wire connector, connect the serial cable as follows (see also Figure 4):

Blue to Connector 1
Red to Connector 2
Orange to Connector 4
Grey to Connector 7
Brown to Connector 8
White to Connector 9
Yellow to Connector 11
Yellow/Green to Connector 12

By using the plastic strip wire connector, connect the SCART cable as follows (see also Figure 5):

Red to Connector 1
Pink to Connector 2
Green to Connector 5
Yellow to Connector 6
Blue to Connector 7
Black to Connector 9
That yeuky colour that can't be described to Connector 12

Boot the Amiga and create the MountList entry and then the ARexxII script (see the MountList and the Script).
Back-up and enjoy (see Figure 6)!

MountList:

/* This is the MountList for the Tape Streamer Device */

TAPE: Handler = L:Queue-Handler StackSize = 10000 Priority = 5 GlobVec = 0

Script:

/* Tape Streamer Device Controlling Software

Note: This script is written in the new ARexxII programming language and as such will NOT work with ARexx */

partitions=4 /* Adjust to suit as necessary */ SAY TO SCREEN SAY TO SCREEN "Please enter number of partitions to back-up..." PULL number IF number=partitions JUMP BackupAll: ELSE JUMP WhichDrive: JUMP END

WhichDrive: drive=0 IF drive=partitions JUMP END SAY TO SCREEN "Back-up drive DH"drive PULL question IF question="Y" JUMP BackupDrive: ELSE drive=drive+1 JUMP WhichDrive:

BackupDrive: /* HIT RECORD!!! */ SAY TO SCREEN SAY TO SCREEN "Backing-up drive DH"drive doscommand = "COPY DH"drive": TO TAPE: ALL QUIET" ADDRESS COMMAND doscommand drive=drive+1 JUMP WhichDrive:

BackupAll: /* HIT RECORD!!! */ SAY TO SCREEN SAY TO SCREEN "Backing-up ALL partitions" drive=0

Backup: doscommand = "COPY DH"drive": TO TAPE: ALL QUIET" ADDRESS COMMAND doscommand IF drive=partitions JUMP END ELSE drive=drive+1 JUMP Backup:

EXIT 0

Notes:

You can only back-up a hard drive if you have a hard drive to back-up.
Always MOUNT TAPE: before running the ARexxII script.
An E-180 video cassette will back-up 180Mb of data in approximately 18 minutes.
If you can, use a Super-VHS VCR instead. (There is no real reason for this whatsoever other than it allows you to boast that you can actually afford to own one.)
If you should happen to accidentally remove the wee tab in the side of the video cassette that stops you recording over the tape, simply chew an Irn Bru chew until it is soft enough to plug the gap.

That's all for the now. Next month, I'll be monitoring your progress as you build your very own low cost ultra high resolution display medium.

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