Remember PC Tools from Central Point?

Discussion in 'Software' started by Inkslinger3, Nov 1, 2002.

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  1. Inkslinger3

    Inkslinger3 Private E-2

    This one comes from the "Best-Laid Plans" department.
    Back in the Windows 3.1 days, I had a great utility suite called PC Tools. It had an efficient and easy-to-use backup/restore utility called, appropriately, PCbackup. When I upgraded to Win 95 (now you know how long ago this was), I looked for the Win 95 version of PCTools. It never happened. Apparently Microsoft bought the rights to some of their utilities, and they quietly went out of business.

    Here's my problem: ALL MY BACKUPS had been done with the PC Tools backup utility. Of course, they used a proprietary compression scheme. And of course, the old version (updated just before Win95 came out) wouldn't install on the 95 system. I cannot recover any of those backups. surely by now, somebody has come up with a utility that runs under current Windows systems to restore from the Central Point format. Any ideas?

    Don't tell me, "your backups are toast - you are the proud owner of a lot of scratch disks." That thought has occurred. :-(

    Thanks in advance if you can suggest a tool I can use.
    John
     
  2. Lordelin

    Lordelin Sgt. Nobody

    Buddy I hate to tell you this, But I think your outta luck. :(
     
  3. Cretin!

    Cretin! Private E-2

    Pctools rocked.

    Actually Central Point was acquired by Symantec in 1994, but in it's day PcTools
    was the greatest utility of it's kind.

    The answer to your problem does not seem all that difficult to me. All you will
    need is an extra machine, a copy of DOS, a copy of PCTOOLS and your PCBackups.

    Do as follows:

    1)Find another PC and either format the existing hard drive, or install a spare.
    Alternately you could simply disconnect the existing hard drive in your main PC and
    install a spare.

    2)Install DOS and PCTools and then perform a restore of your backups.

    3)Power down machine and place the hard drive with the freshly restored files
    in your main machine jumpered as a slave to your main hard drive.

    4)Copy all necessary files from one hard drive to the other.

    Alternately you could try a program called VMWARE which creates a virtual machine
    within your existing OS that you can pretty much install anything on. When this virtual machine is created you will still need to install DOS on it as well as PCTOOLS but if you can get the backup restore to work you should be able to copy files from teh virtual machine as needed.
     
  4. Inkslinger3

    Inkslinger3 Private E-2

    Ah, yes. I knew that...

    Great minds...
    I do have parts of an old machine that I'd like to use to re-create a Win 3.1 machine. I'd even put my QUIC-80 tape drive in it. If I got courageous, I might even try to hook it up to my little household LAN (I have copies of the old FTP Software TCP/IP suite for DOS), and I bought a couple of old 8-bit thinline e-net cards at a yard sale. And I still have the disks, so I could do that.

    But what I'd really like to find, is some shareware utility, that has the PC Tools format as one of its conversion formats.

    John
     
  5. I have just joined, so the info I have may not be of any use to you or you may have solved your problem.
    While sorting thro' some old floppies I have come across copies of ver 7.22 of CP Backup and wondered if they could be of use to you.
    At present it may be that I am in the same position as you were in 2002.

    It may be that the program is still under copyright but as it has been approx 12 year since Symantic acquired Central Point (software) I feel that to help resolve a situation of obsolescence a copy of the program may be acceptable.
     
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