Need help with old MS Backups

Canary_Jules

Prominent Member
Joined
Jan 25, 2003
Messages
3,672
Reaction score
1,461
Points
943
Location
Leicester, UK
Hi, way back in 1995 I backed up my PhD thesis to 5 floppy discs using the MS Backup utility in good 'ole Windows 3.1. Now I've decided to self publish it I need to extract the files but Vista doesn't recognise the file format. They end in a .001, .002 depending on the number of the disc. Can anyone give me any idea how I might go about retrieving the data in these files?

Thanks in advance for your help!
 
Download VirtualPC/VMware. Install Win 3.1 on that. And retrieve your backed up files.
 
It's possible that the files are just simple splits. A program called HJSplit will split larger files into .001, .002 etc and of course join the split files back together again.

You could try downloading HJSplit (its free) and seeing if it will join the .001,002 files back into a single readable file, but of course it depends how the software split the file in the first place. HJSplit does no formatting it's literally like taking a knife and dividing the large file up into chunks, no compressing etc.

Can you remember what you used to split the files onto floppy originally - Winzip ?

Failing that, the VMWare suggestion is excellent !
 
I think the msbackup program was still available in windows 95 or windows 98 if you know anyone with those operating systems still installed. I remember restoring a backup for someone with one of those OSs so if you really get stuck I could fire up my Win95 and Win98 virtual PCs and restore it.
I'm assuming here that the backup program is the same as in windows 3.1 :confused:
 
In that case virtual machine is the way to go.
Plus it's interesting and geeky playing with VMware :D
 
Thinking about it, I'm sure the msbackup files that I've restored have been .qic files. I'm wondering if they changed the backup progam between windows 3.1 and windows 95/98 ?
 

The latest video from AVForums

Is 4K Blu-ray Worth It?
Subscribe to our YouTube channel
Back
Top Bottom