Serial Port & INTERLNK.EXE or Laplink?

keenerb wrote on 2022-01-24, 03:55:

It's running windows 3.11. MSBACKUP and 200 floppies seems to be pretty much my only real option?

I can probably get a parallel port NIC up and running tho, now that I think about it...

You can burn CDs on a 486, so you could even back up to a zip file and burn it to a CD if the machine has one, kinda slow but Laplink or NIC is going to be slow too.

its this one: https://thinkwiki.de/N51 - the N51SLC ?

maybe there is some adaptor to connect your ESDI 80MB HD to a normal PC? i can't find one

try ask: David Gesswein djg@pdp8online.com from https://www.pdp8online.com/mfm/ - he developed a MFM/RLL emulator - maybe he knows a backup solution for your ESDI?

You could use a parallel port Compact Flash adapter along with an old version of Ghost, dolly or any Dos based disk imaging utility.
Or g4u with an MCA network card, depending on how much memory your machine has.
How big is your hdd?

I do have a parallel port CF adapter. That's a good idea. Hard drive is only 200mb.

I think for a DOS/WINDOWS 3.11 machine something as simple as XCOPY can be used to take a backup?

If you want a copy of the files yes, xcopy should work fine.
If you want a raw disk image, use dolly, it requires a 286 with 4MB only.
https://www.sac.sk/download/utildisk/dolly.zip