You're at work, and the clock is about to strike midnight. As you prepare to back up your 1-gigabyte hard-disk drive, a flash of lightning and a crash of thunder startle you. You jump and accidentally knock the drive off your desk. As it falls to the floor, your own scream wakes you.
Maybe your backup nightmares aren't this bad, but if they are, we prescribe a dose of DiskTwin, from Golden Triangle. DiskTwin is available either as a NuBus or as a PDS (processor-direct slot) card, with software, for IIci's, SE/30s, and NuBus machines that provides a special SCSI port. Your primary hard drive plugs in to the standard DB-25 SCSI connector on the back of a Mac. You plug an identical or larger drive, destined to become a twin of the primary drive, in to the DiskTwin SCSI connector. Using the DiskTwine control panel, you then create a link between the two drives, and DiskTwin matches the drives according to their SCSI IDs.
Activating the link causes the contents of a primary drive to be copied to its twin drive, an operation Golden Triangle calls synchronizing. Henceforth, any operation that writes data to a primary drive is duplicated on its twin. No more cold sweats in the middle of the night — your data is backed up the moment it's written. An important item to note about DiskTwin is that it does not slow the computer down. The hardware operates independently of the Mac’s built-in SCSI.
But don't run out and buy DiskTwin if you believe that it can protect your data from every problem. DiskTwin protects you from hardware problems only in your primary drives. It cannot shield you from viruses, power surges, or pilot error. For example, if someone throws all your files into the Trash, all the tiles on the twin drive will also be thrown into the Trash (DiskTwin is an obedient servant).
To protect yourself against theft or acts of God, use a removable-cartridge drive for your twin. This way you can use two cartridges, resynchronizing the older cartridge and taking the current one home for off-site backup.
You also won't be protected from software bombs that take the hard disk with them. Get the idea? The point with DiskTwin is that when you do have a hardware crash (bad block, head crash, controller or power-supply failure), DiskTwin senses the loss of the primary drive and automatically switches over to the twin without a hiccup. You can set DiskTwin either to alert you with a dialog box when something goes wrong or to politely send you an E-mail message if you're on Microsoft Mail (Golden Triangle is developing a CE Software QuickMail notification that should be available soon). A companion software product, PartitionTwin, is included in the DiskTwin package. PartitionTwin uses the same hardware but lets you back up multiple partitions from multiple drives to a single twin drive. This way you can keep only important data backed up, so you don't have to have a twin drive that exactly matches the size of your primary drive. DiskTwin is easy to install and set up, and it's also fast and absolutely transparent in operation. Thank goodness, because we can t afford to lose any more sleep.
Hipschman, Ron. (November 1991). DiskTwin. MacUser. (pg. 91).
Golden Triangle Computers
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2021-12-06 / 
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DiskTwin_2.1.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
