Before answering these questions, you should have some sense for what SpinRite and TIP do and how they differ:

SpinRite is a general purpose mass storage utility that is unmatched for its ability to recover data from "crashed" drives, reconstitute file and user data lost through run away software, viruses, dropped computers, operator errors, power failures or any other mishaps. No matter what you do to your hard, floppy, or other drives, SpinRite knows how to maintain their data surfaces in tip top shape. And if any of your data can not be read, SpinRite digs down and pulls it back from past the edge of oblivion. SpinRite's technology really is that good. (If you're curious for more details, please download SpinRite's "What's Under the Hood" technical note, a 165k PDF file)

SpinRite is still the top-selling data recovery utility after more than ten years and five major revisions because it is very easy to use and it has saved more data and maintained more drives than all other competing utilities combined. Ten years ago SpinRite had many active competitors, but today they're all gone because SpinRite turned out to be the only mass storage utility that the industry needed. As BYTE Magazine said when it named SpinRite for the year's award for technical achievement:

BUT ...

Although SpinRite owes much of its success and power to its generality, which allows it to work on any hard, floppy, or other disk, it does not know SPECIFICALLY about the unique characteristics of the Iomega Zip and Jaz drives.

This is where the Iomega-specific "Trouble In Paradise" utility comes into play...

TIP was written specifically to determine the health and condition of Iomega Zip and Jaz drives. Unlike SpinRite, TIP does not know how to repair damage that's been done to the cartridges (although TIP's use can indeed be beneficial). Instead, TIP provides valuable information about an Iomega drive's and cartridge's "behind the scenes" defective sector management that's normally completely hidden from the user.

Before SpinRite can be used on any Iomega drive and cartridge you must verify that the drive is capable of writing correctly to its cartridges. This is what TIP was designed to help you verify. If an Iomega drive is NOT writing correctly then running SpinRite -- or any other utility -- would just give the drive more opportunity to mess up your cartridges!

If you don't own SpinRite you can use TIP all by itself as an early warning system to alert you to damaging behavior from your Iomega drives.

If you ever need to recover data from your Iomega drives, and you want to use SpinRite for that task. You must first use TIP to verify that the drive is functioning. If not it must first be replaced, and only then should SpinRite be employed for data recovery operations.

On 8/4/98 Blake Eiseman wrote...

On 8/5/98 Alan Farzier replied...

Then on 8/12/98 Pudly DoRight followed up with ...

One last note: SpinRite will take much longer than TIP to examine the entire data surface of a Zip or Jaz cartridge, because SpinRite's surface analysis tests are far more extensive and sophisticated. (See the technote mentioned above for information on this too.) But as a result, SpinRite does a much better job of detecting and removing defective sectors than TIP can. After all, that's what SpinRite was designed for, TIP wasn't. So if your data is really important to you, you might want to consider the occasional use of SpinRite to flush all defective sectors off the Zip or Jaz disk. You can then monitor the defect sector counts by running TIP before and after SpinRite, which is what TIP is all about. Tip will report on the number of sectors that were taken out of service by SpinRite's extensive surface analysis testing.