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QuickStart: Replication & Recovery 1.2

Issue 55

From Issue #55
November 1998

Nov 01, 1998  By Daniel Lazenby
 in
With QuickStart, bare-metal recovery is reduced to a mere three-step process and a couple of mouse clicks.
Supported Devices

Devices supported by QuickStart version 1.2 include Seagate, Exabyte and Iomega parallel port TR-1, TR-3 and 2GB tape drives. SCSI adapters supported by QuickStart include Adaptec, Mylex/Buslogic and NCR. The Iomega and SyQuest removable SCSI disk drives are also supported. Floppy tape drives such as the Travan Ditto are supported as well. Older QIC80 tape drives are not supported by Version 1.2 of QuickStart. My Colorado Mountain 250/350 is an example of one such unsupported QIC80 tape drive. I have heard there are plans to support parallel devices such as the Iomega ZIPplus and SyQuest drives. Check the EST web site for an up-to-date list of supported devices.

Manuals and Support

The 23-page user's manual is more of a pamphlet than a manual. It is simply written and easily read. Bold titles and headings make it easy to locate information by “thumbing” through the manual. It also includes backup administrative and management suggestions.

I learned the first source of support should be the vendor who sold you the QuickStart product. In addition to the vendor's support, EST maintains a web site and a support e-mail address. E-mails to the support address received prompt and informative responses. At the time of this writing (August), the web site's support pages were primarily focused on the BRU product. A “Tech Tips” page provided some concepts and tools relating to BRU backups. Hopefully, the EST “Tech Tips” web page will grow to include information on how the BRU and QuickStart products can be used together to provide reliable bare-metal backup and recovery.

Relationship of QuickStart to BRU

QuickStart and BRU are comparable products. QuickStart provides the means to make an easily restored full system backup. BRU provides the means of making full backups and daily incremental/differential backups. Note that a BRU backup tape cannot be used with the QuickStart diskette. QuickStart uses a sector-by-sector backup to make an image of the disk, and BRU does a file-by-file backup. This difference in backup techniques means QuickStart can read only QuickStart tapes.

Where Can You Buy QuickStart?

QuickStart can be purchased directly from Enhanced Software Technologies, Inc. Additional resellers are listed on Enhanced Software Technologies' web site.

My test system was a Pentium II-based ASUS P2L97 motherboard, with 64MB RAM, 3.2GB Quantum Disk and an IDE-attached Eagle TR-4i Tape Drive.

Daniel Lazenby holds a B.S. in Decision Sciences. He first encountered UNIX in 1983 and discovered Linux in 1994. Today he provides engineering support for a range of platforms running Linux, AIX and HP-UX. He can be reached at dlazenby@ix.netcom.com.

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