This past weekend I reinstalled my primary PC from scratch - both to clean up the cruft and dump the Win98 partitition that I never used. Of course one of the first orders of business was to make a complete backup to my external 320GB hard drive. (Highly recommended - big drives are relatively cheap and easy to use in an external USB case. And, if you don't leave it except when you're using it, it should last for years.)

But while I was at it, I decided to chuck some of the old CD & DVD backups I had on the drive too. Then I can spend some time sorting through, eliminating duplicates, and organizing. Then make a backup of the most important stuff to DVD in case the external drive fails, or I accidentally kill it.

Anyway, I discovered the backups I'd made circa 1999-2002 were created using a dedicated backup program which used a proprietary format. No problem, I thought, I have the install CD and license key. I'll just reinstall, restore, then I can put the CDRWs in the re-use pile. First problem - the !@#$@ program wouldn't install on Windows XP! 95, 98 or NT4 only! (Of course, I discovered this after I vaporized my Win98 partition, figures.) Compatibility mode wasn't much better, it installed but didn't recognize the CD drives.

Fortunately, I've got New England pack-rat blood in my background, so I've got a few old computers laying around, including a couple of working ThinkPads with fresh Win98 installs. Well, the backup program didn't like the first one I tried, and the uninstall trashed something so I'm probably going to have to rebuild it. I had better success with the second one (without the mWave sound+modem DSP) but it still wouldn't recognize the CD. Then it hit me - the #$^&@#( thing wants a CD burner even to restore! Again, my pack-rat tendencies pay off and I haul my external parallel-port burner out of storage. That does the trick, and I'm off to the races seeing if there's anything worth restoring.

I've since discovered that one of the CDs is unreadable. I had the same problem when I made a CD of all kinds of stuff I had laying around on floppies (both 3.5 and 5.25) and DC2120 tape. There were a few disks which were unreadable (and the one with a pirate copy of Orcad which I'd password protected and now couldn't recall what obvious password I would have used).

The morals of the story:

1. Your backups are only as good as your last restore.

2. Avoid proprietary media (i.e tape) and formats like the plague. I'm sure WinXP would still read 5.25 360K FAT12 floppies (given the hardware), but once you drop off the upgrade treadmill it's surprising how quickly that proprietary media/format becomes unreadable.

3. Keep your backup media up to date. My external drive should be good as long as USB2 is common. But Macsters with Firewire drives might want to think about upgrading.