Back in the late 90s, I recall seeing magazine ads for a small NAS called the "Snap" server. If you could find one, I imagine you could connect one of these to the dedicated retro computer network and use that to back them up, and it would still be perfectly at home among your Win98 machines in regards to its own "retroness" since it's from the same time period.

torindkflt wrote:

Back in the late 90s, I recall seeing magazine ads for a small NAS called the "Snap" server. If you could find one, I imagine you could connect one of these to the dedicated retro computer network and use that to back them up, and it would still be perfectly at home among your Win98 machines in regards to its own "retroness" since it's from the same time period.

cool I'll look for that...

Retro backup? Sun 'lunchbox' SPARCstation IPC/IPX/Classic with internal and external SCSI.

Great thing about SCSI is that it's fully backwards compatible both ways so with a suitable adapter you can connect fairly voluminous newer drives to ancient hardware like this.

Or you can just build your own "retro Nas" with a raspberry pi. This one has been serving me for year now 😀

Although I don't really use it to backup data (except when I want to backup the original installation of a OEM computer), it serves me well to easily transfer data to anything retro, from pentium 3 to 8088.

It has a usb to sata adapter, a HDD I've gotten from a laptop, 2 network interfaces (ethernet and WiFi), and I've configured it to act as a router to the internet, I install a DHCP server, PXE server (very neat to quickly install windows or run some quick tests without even needing a hard drive), and more importantly an FTP server and a Samba file share that works is from DOS to Windows 10.

But even if I don't do backups, I can clearly see a way for you to do this !.
Or if a pi is too limited due to the "everything is connected to one usb port" you can also replicate this with any old computer from the 2000's basically and setup RAIDs even !

I've found that the easiest way to access modern storage from different eras retro machines is FTP.
Setup an FTP on your network (can be a NAS with FTP access or something like a Pi). There are FTP clients for every imaginable platform out there, my way is to have a batch file connect to the FTP and transfer some folders or a whole drive over.

I take the sneaker net approach for backups. I usually do two separate backups. One backup is the initial image of the system, and the second is a customized image of the system that can be a "final" version, or something incremental.

Initial image: Base OS install + drivers.
Customized Image: Base OS install + drivers + software + games + tweaks .. etc.

I take the CF card or hard drive out of the system once I have the system in a state I like it, then just image that drive and store it on my modern file server (ESXi, Windows Server 2016, 40TB storage, etc). This is far easier than trying to connect other peripherals such as network cards to retro systems that I may have to jump through hoops to get working, and far quicker than trying to install shoddy software to create a backup and transfer it across the network if that's even possible on the specific system. Also, a lot of original backup software was picky and didn't always work well to capture everything as intended.

Otherwise, for random smaller stuff that needs backed up on retro systems that have network access or an easily removable storage option, I'll transfer it over the network (usually FTP) to the folder I have setup for each retro system, or I'll copy it over floppy/USB and sneaker net it to that folder.