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Restoring old DOS backups in 2023

Recently, as part of an ongoing effort to preserve old work, and to free up physical storage space, I went through the process of imaging all my 3.5-inch floppy disks. I’ve been using my Kryoflux board to save off a .img file for each floppy.

While most of the disks contained .zip files, or multi-disk .zip archives (something for another post), there were several multi-disk backup sets created by some version of DOS Backup in the mid-nineties.

Each of these backup disks contained a single file with names like KK50306D.001. Looking at these files in a hex editor, we can see that they contain the string NORTON Ver 1E in their header. Apparently Microsoft licensed Norton Backup for inclusion in versions of DOS at around that time. The first bytes of a backup file, including the string NORTON Ver 1E

I fondly imagined that someone had written an open source tool for restoring these; I didn’t find one. I briefly thought about doing that myself.

Here are the steps I ended up taking to restore my backup sets:

Some links which helped me through this:

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