The question of which DOS-era floppy backup program was “best” has always bothered me over the years, so today I spent the better part of an afternoon satisfying my curiosity. (By “floppy backup program”, I mean programs that intelligently used high-speed DMA to format and write backup data while the computer was doing other things in the background, like reading from the hard disk and compressing the data.)
Results are here, for the curious:
http://www.oldskool.org/guides/dosbackupshootout
If I missed an obvious one that runs on XT-class hardware, let me know.
Oldskooler Ramblings 