You never know when a customer will come over with such a rare piece, and still beeing able to help them on 20+ year old systems is a big plus to gain their trust. Today I'd probably go with a SCSI emulator and multiple drive images on a flash card instead of multiple drives kept over the years. all of the most popular Macintosh models ROM files for emulation purposes. Such bootable media can contain installation files for multiple OS version, diagnostic and data recovery tools, and for some macs, a working network stack to push backups over Ethernet. Vintage Apple Macintosh M3076 Performa 6200CD Powers On For sale is an Apple. Little hint though : when I worked at an Apple premium resseller's repair booth, I always kept images of bootable drives with blessed system folders on a Linux machine, ready to DD it to a ZIP, syquest or external HDD. edit : plus it will take ages to setup and won't help with the backup part. Note that if you are using a 68k Mac emulator and wish to run Mac OS (such as System 7.5.5, etc), you will need to have a real Mac around somewhere since. My go-to classic Mac emulator was Basilisk II until Catalina hit. I'd strongly advise against wasting time with the CD drive : it would really be a miracle if it can still read modern CD-Rs. Listed on this page are Macintosh emulators: some of them emulate a 68k Macintosh (such as what you get in the Macintosh Quadra, Performa, Classic, etc), others emulate a PowerPC Macintosh. To clean install this machine, after a thorough hard disk test (zeroize it and test every sector once backed up), you will have to boot the machine with anything from 7.5 to 7.6.1 and have the installation files available through either the internal HDD, an external SCSI drive or a CD. For those with original Color Classics, dropping in a 550 motherboard is the quickest, easiest.

The Performa/LC 550 uses the same motherboard as the relatively rare Colour Classic II. It was released at the same time as the 68LC040-based LC 575. Extract the HDD and connect it to any machine with an SCSI-1 (not LVDS) port running either Mac OS, Mac OS X or Linux (windows may do the job with aditionnal software) Mac LC 550 (Performa 550) The LC 550 replaced the LC 520, increasing CPU speed from 25 MHz to 33 MHz.Boot off an external SCSI drive with enough free space to copy up to 160MB out of the internal drive.In order to backup the existing data, you have only two options : The CD player is an apple CD300i (2X, SCSI). This machine came standard with a 160MB SCSI hard disk drive.

Mac perofrma 550 emulator