External Hard Drive?

[grizz]

Hey Folks, I need to be able to back up some large files from several computers. I have 30 or so computers in 20 field offices around the Southeast US. I need to upgrade the O/S on them, some from win95! to win2kpro. I need to be able to backup around 10 Gb or less temporarily. Anyone got any suggestions? I was thinking about an external hard drive, but most of them use USB, and we all know how well 95 does with USB. Parallel port? I would like some speed, but compatibility is most important. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!
Chuck!

 

[Gunbuster]

USB 1, or P-port is gona be super slooooow, just pop open the case and use a second harddrive

Dust the insides at the same time to score extra points with your boss

 

[corkyg]

I see two choices. Probably the fastest, but costliest is SCSI. I do it with Firewire and it works fine. The speed is adequate. Adding a Firewire card is pretty easy, even with 95, and the cost is reasonable. You can get an external 1394 housing and card for about $100. Take it around and create as many reserve HDDs as you need.

I also like Gunbuster's solution, and I do that too. All my drives are in mobile racks, and making exacvt copies is fast and easy. Hard drives are cheap. Mobile racks are cheap. DriveCopy 4.0 is cheap. (You don't even need to install it - just carry around a set of bootable floppies.) And it is a lot faster. I clone 40 GB drives in about 30 minutes on average.