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[ChiTownMike]

Are there recommendations on how to back up the Lisa HD?   I have a floppy emu and I was thinking of creating 10 MB blank image - but not sure what I'd use to create that image - especially since it's running multiple environments.  I'm sure someone must have already figured this out - your help is appreciated!

Michael

[stepleton]

A Floppy Emu will not help you very much as a backup medium, as the Lisa only knows how to use the floppy drive connector to speak to a floppy drive. (It's not like a Macintosh where the floppy connector can connect to an HD20 hard drive, for example.)

Instead, I'd recommend the following: work out a way to connect a serial cable to your Lisa, then use BLU to download an image of your hard drive to a modern computer with Xmodem.

[compu_85]

The way I always do this is with BLU, and just dump the image to a PC over the serial port.

-J

[ChiTownMike]

I recently purchased a Serial WIFI modem and am able to use it with the Lisa - can BLU be used to dump to FTP instead of a PC?

The way I always do this is with BLU, and just dump the image to a PC over the serial port.

-J

[stepleton]

No, BLU has no capability to do FTP or anything having to do with the internet: you need to attach an old-fashioned serial cable, correctly wired, between your Lisa and your modern computer, then use a program like HyperTerminal (Windows) or minicom (Linux) or ZTerm (Mac) to establish a serial connection to the Lisa over the serial cable.

To download your hard drive image over the serial cable, the serial program you use must support a file-transfer mechanism called XModem, and of the three programs I mentioned, I'm not sure HyperTerminal does. (The other two have it.)

You may be able to make use of your WiFi modem, provided that the Lisa and whatever serial program you're using on the modern PC can pretend there's just an ordinary wired cable connecting the two of them.

Welcome to the pre-Web home computer communication world of the 1980s!

[sigma7]

BLU has no capability to do FTP or anything having to do with the internet
...
You may be able to make use of your WiFi modem, provided that the Lisa and whatever serial program you're using on the modern PC can pretend there's just an ordinary wired cable connecting the two of them.

Although it isn't practical to add a networking stack to BLU, there might be less required to support some kind of xmodem via telnet function.

Searching for telnet xmodem, at https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3prwv3/xmodem_over_telnet_sort_of/ I see suggestions including c-kermit, screen, and syncterm.bbsdev.net

I'll try to obtain one of the WiFi modems and see if BLU will work with something like that.