Gosh Brian, it's tough that you/we need to prove something like this
to someone. Of course this isn't unique to Pick or AP/Pro, _every_
system is subject to crash at some point. Larger companies know this
and spend lots of money on redundant disks, entire systems, backup
server licenses, hot-backup procedures, etc. This is the state of
modern technology, not a Pick thing.

Maybe this is compelling: if you do need to reinstall your AP/Pro,
your boot floppies might not work for some reason - this has happened.
Raining Data will probably not replace them since the platform has
been dead for many years, and you may not be able to find replacements
in the field (for a long time anyway). So even if you do have
complete backups, you may not be able to reboot if your system simply
goes down even after a power outtage.

And even if you have good backups there is no guarantee that you'll be
able to read the data onto a more modern system/drive if the equipment
you have now fails. We've seen this here too.

In any case, as I suggested, I did a quick search on CDP for the term
"no backup" and got a couple hits:
http://tinyurl.com/9shfw

I also see a CDP thread from 1998 with subject "AP/Pro may be dead
anyway". I highly recommend you read just a few of the quotes from
that thread, including "Even if Pick decides to extend the life of
AP/Pro, finding hardware components to run it will be next to
impossible."

Here are other snippets (using the keyword "crashed") that we've had
the misfortune to see in this forum -
"entire system has crashed and won't come back up again."
"AP/PRO crashed big time"
"The system crashed so suddenly..."
"Though I have been using the console for years with no such problem,
just minutes ago my AP/PRO machine crashed miserably while I was using
the console, and now I'm having to reload from scratch! ... I'm just
very glad I am "religious" about making complete backups often!"
"So, every night these people had been dutifully backing up and
verifying their system to a disk file, and removing a tape that hadn't
been used each morning !"
"We have a client running AP on an old Motorola system, and the disk
crashed..."
"Time is money (a lot) when you have 50 employees sitting around
waiting for the system to come back up."
"...my PC crashed and I did not have a backup so I lost the contact
info...."
"My AP/Pro system crashed (I won't go into details) ... After crash, I
lost my Tandberg scsi tape drive. System hangs when load.driver
attempts to locate the drive..."
"I just finished restoring all my data on crashed Pick APPro 6.1.x"
"...can not restore a totally crashed system without about a days
worth of work."

That sort of thing goes on if you look for the words "dead" or "help",
etc. AP/Pro was/is a real work horse and people loved it because it
kept on working - much better than it's early D3 successors and
arguably better than some of today's offerings. It's easy to trust it
just a little too much. But when old systems die they cost a LOT of
time and money to replace, and some of these systems did a crash and
burn with no means of recovery.

Just try to answer a few questions to assess your risk:
- If this system dies, are we positive that we can recover without
losing business time? (Can you do a fresh install to a different
system or hard-drive? Do you take the chance of cannibalizing your
working system to do such a test?)
- How much will it cost us if this system is down for a week? (Wasted
labor, issues with customers and suppliers, etc.)
- If we completely lose our system and data, how will we replace it
and how much will it cost? (Separate estimate if all data is
available vs complete loss of all data.)
- Is it any easier to fund a planned migration than one which is
unplanned? If so, what is the cost difference? This can be
translated as the net loss for taking a bad risk (aka losing the bet),
beyond the basic cost of recovery.

Side thought - I don't know if your insurance company covers losses
due to failures like this. I wonder if they would pay a penny if it's
determined that known risks are being ignored.

I hope it doesn't seem like I'm belaboring this point, I know _you_
get it, someone needs to impress upon the owner that these things
happen without warning and with severe consequences far beyond "dang,
the system is down again."

Good luck.
T

"Always look on the bright side of life... " (whistle)
- Monty Python




briangateley (AT) tds (DOT) net wrote:

Brian,

PicLan is surprisingly easy to install - if you can find a compatible
network card.

I remember having network cards with BNC that were NE2000 (???) compatible
then
there were some cards that had "Digital" chips on them that would increase
the speed.

You have to install the network card, then install the PicLan software - and
by the way,
you can still download it from the internet - search Easy company for
ModSoft.

You have to install a PicLan client on each computer to use PicLan. I know
it only
uses IPX protocol, but I think there was a way you could buy TCP/IP
software. Once
installed, it lets the computer establish a connection to the AP/PRO server.
It comes
with its own Terminal Emulator, but if you have AccuTerm, or download a
trial version,
it works much better.

I don't remember using it with XP, but I might have.

Larry

If you have AccuTerm,
<briangateley (AT) tds (DOT) net> wrote

Just a few weeks ago, one of my customers had an AP/Pro crash. The floppy
drive was bad so we replaced it. Then the Pick system disks were bad so we
paid $500 to get new ones sent overnight from RD. We got the system up, but
they lost one day of data and 3 days of work. I wonder how much those 4
business days cost them.
Jeff

"Tony Gravagno" <g6q3x9lu53001 (AT) sneakemail (DOT) com.invalid> wrote

Good ammo for your other clients to demonstrate how "cheap" it is to
stay current with technology (hardware & software)

Thanks for everybody's input! I actually got the new tape drive
working yesterday and everything seems hunky-dory. I contacted Zumasys
and the guy there had me delete the %scsi.tape% file and then restore
ABS from the original Pick diskettes...took a few hours and didn't help
at all, still got the same error. However, while I was waiting for
that, I was browsing this newsgroup looking for any other posts
relating to SCSI tape drives and came across one where somebody had
discovered that, for some totally bizarre reason, setting the number of
processes in the boot menu affected his tape drive. Since I was
grasping for straws, I tried it and it worked like a charm!

I spent a lot of time on this, but I learned a few things about Pick
too, so it wasn't totally wasted time. And although I agree that
upgrading to a new system would in general be a good idea, the fact
that I was able to completely reproduce our system on a totally
different computer does give me some sense of security. I think as
long as we're getting good backups and I keep this other computer on
hand just in case, we should be good to go for a while yet...knock on
wood!

You were very lucky this time. You only lost a few days and 20% of your
hair. How much did that down time cost? Next time you may not be so lucky.
It may be unrecoverable. Then what are you going to do?

<briangateley (AT) tds (DOT) net> wrote

We actually weren't down at all, I had set up a test PC that I was
using to try and figure the new tape drive out. The only thing it cost
was about $200 for the tape drive and a fair amount of my
time...although most of that was just waiting for
backups/restores/installations, so I was able to work on other things
too. And as I said, now I know I can set up a completely new system,
using my test PC if nothing else, so even if we had a totally
unrecoverable breakdown, as long as I'm getting good backups, and our
System and ABS diskettes are ok (I'm making multiple copies!), I could
restore to the other PC and we'd be up and running in a few hours.

And fortunately, I've got a good head of hair, so a 20% loss isn't a
big problem :-)