The easiest way to backup files onto a floppy disk is to use a program called tar and backup your files onto a regular DOS-formatted disk. (Note: some backups may exceed the 1.5 megabyte space limit imposed by 3.5 inch floppy disks.) The following steps detail the procedure:

To format your floppy disk in DOS format (Note: formatting will destroy all data on the disk), use the following procedures:

Make sure your floppy disk is not write protected and is in the drive and type:

fdformat /dev/fd0

fdformat is the standard UNIX floppy formatting utility, and /dev/fd0 is the device file corresponding to the floppy drive.

Answer 'y'es to the confirmation question, and when the program exits, type:

mformat A:/

mformat is a utility which installs a DOS-type File Allocation Table (FAT) onto floppy disks, and A is a DOS pseudonym for the floppy drive.

If both commands exit properly, your disk should be correctly formatted as a DOS floppy disk.

Create a tar archive containing the files you wish to backup using the following command:

tar cvf <archive-file-name> <files-and-directories-you-want-preserved>

In the above command,

• the c option told tar that it was to create an archive
• the v option told tar that it was to list (verbosely) all the files it inserts in the archive
• the f option told tar that it was to create an archive called <archive-file-name>
• and the rest of the arguments are names of files and directories you wish to have put into the tar archive

Once you have a tar archive created, you should view it's contents and make sure it contains all the files you want preserved with the command:

tar tf <archive-file-name>

In this command the t option told tar that you wished to list the files in the archive, and the f option told tar that <archive-file-name> was the name of the tar archive file whose contents you wished to view.

When you are satisfied that you have preserved all files you wanted, you may use a program called mcopy to copy your tar archive to floppy disk with the command:

mcopy <archive-file-name> A:/

where <archive-file-name> is the name of the tar archive and A is a DOS pseudonym for the floppy drive. You may also wish to compress your archive file before storing it to floppy disk with the command gzip, using the command: gzip <archive-file-name>.

You may check to make sure your file saved properly with the command: mdir.