What Happened to QIC Tape Backup? Why the Friday Backup Tape Disappeared

Irwin Magnetic Systems told office users in 1985 to copy the entire hard disk every Friday, onto a tape marked with a colored label. By 1998 more than 15 million quarter-inch drives were installed, and that Friday backup tape was already fading from the office. 3M patented the belt driven data cartridge in 1972. The cheapest QIC-80 drives borrowed the floppy controller and moved about 2.2 MB a minute, while hard disks kept growing. In 1993 Conner Peripherals wrote off all remaining goodwill from its roughly $150 million purchase of Archive, the quarter-inch revenue leader, even as drive shipments climbed. You will learn: Where did the Friday full backup routine come from? Why did one standards group end up with dozens of tape formats? How did the floppy controller make tape backup cheap and slow? Why did Conner write off Archive within a year of buying it? Where did office backup go once files moved to the server? If you ever turned the little plug to safe and left a Friday tape running when you went home, tell us how your office labeled its rotation. Subscribe for careful histories of the devices plugged into the office PC. Was yours the Monday tape or the Friday tape? Sources: Tape Drive Irwin 110 / Irwin 125 User's Guide - Irwin Magnetic Systems, 1985: https://bitsavers.org/pdf/irwinMagnet... The QIC-24 and QIC-02 Standards, Revision D - Tandberg Data and the QIC Working Group, 1983: https://archive.org/details/bitsavers... Conner Peripherals Annual Report on Form 10-K for 1993 - SEC EDGAR, 1994: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/da... US Patent 3,692,255, Belt Driven Tape Cartridge - Robert A. Von Behren, 3M, 1972: https://patents.google.com/patent/US3... #QICTape #TapeBackup #QIC80 #ColoradoJumbo #TravanTape #DataCartridge #ArchiveCorporation #BackupRotation #RetroComputing #OfficeTechnology Disclaimer: The voiceover used in this video was generated using AI.