I don't really do a back up. The 5 or 6 Macs that I regularly use could all fit on a 1G thumb drive. Is it worth it to back up a 40M hard drive?
The OS install is easy enough from CD-ROM or floppy. Any files that I have on any of my classics are already on my Mac Pro. Getting them back on is as easy as burning a CD, or throwing them on a Zip disk. Not to mention, I also have pretty much everything on floppies too.
If you've seriously tweaked out an OS, then I get the need to do a backup. If you're talking about sub-100MB drives then I'd probably just copy the whole drive over to a ZIP disk then sneaker net it over to a modern machine for long term storage. If it's a couple hundred Megs then I'd maybe copy the whole thing to an external SCSI drive. SCSI-to-USB it to a modern machine. You could even burn them to a CD at that point and use that for a restore, provided that your classic has a SCSI CD-ROM dive.
The OS install is easy enough from CD-ROM or floppy. Any files that I have on any of my classics are already on my Mac Pro. Getting them back on is as easy as burning a CD, or throwing them on a Zip disk. Not to mention, I also have pretty much everything on floppies too.
If you've seriously tweaked out an OS, then I get the need to do a backup. If you're talking about sub-100MB drives then I'd probably just copy the whole drive over to a ZIP disk then sneaker net it over to a modern machine for long term storage. If it's a couple hundred Megs then I'd maybe copy the whole thing to an external SCSI drive. SCSI-to-USB it to a modern machine. You could even burn them to a CD at that point and use that for a restore, provided that your classic has a SCSI CD-ROM dive.