Old tapes

[mk]

I found some old tapes that can save me weeks.

Any idea where are all those 1/4 century old software I might have used?

W98 and earlier are tested,
Colorado backup, TMate and Backup MyPC also.
Ezscsi is evading.

Propriety Fastape is recognised but adapter is missing.

HEADERQIC113 is alo present but reader is unknown.
Windows header appears but in last block.

Anybody remembers a situation where xcopy and drive letter(or string) of some sort was possible?

No, not really.
Just a sort of a puke.

[thesameguy]

Most of the early tape drives used limited SCSI interfaces, but then floppy interfaces became popular, and then in the very late days some came out with IDE interfaces. The SCSI ones could be addressed with the right driver, but AFAIK there was never a driver for the floppy or IDE interfaces to let them be accessed without their native software. Because those interfaces were typically proprietary and the tape file system was proprietary, there really wouldn't be a way for the OS to access to the data on the drive, even if it could access the drive. Your option would be to stream the data and then manually dissect it - awful. I seem to recall some very late iterations of tape software being able to read other peoples' tapes - maybe as smaller companies got acquired or as a way to sell new stuff to people - but I couldn't even begin to guess at what read what.

Other software I remember was Symantec's stuff - Norton Backup, Backup Exec, and one other name I can't think of. There was the low-end version of Veritas which worked with floppy tapes. There was a program in PC Tools. Of course there was NT Backup, which may have been based on Symantec's Backup Exec IIRC.

You know, this would be a great application for Linux. I'll bet somewhere you can find a distro of it that has still for QIC tapes (I assume that's what you've got!). I'll bet dd can get the data off - though I have no idea what it would look like. There could also be Linux versions of software that will read other backups.

Kinda like this:

http://defianttech.com/2013/03/12/recovering-qic-150-tapes-a-case-study/

There is also ftape, but I have *zero* experience with it - I don't think it will help you.

[mk]

My drive is 2150S and data is off, at least once, with dd.
Amiga tapes I leave for the future, disk image I've read but that was never an issue.
(http://www.recycledgoods.com/cdc-94171-327-imprimis-300mb-scsi-5-25-hdd.html)
(half the data size and controller as self ported ST01)
(controller not operational in all stances)

Some tapes were DC600A, tense is right, they are no more.
(less important, no sense to contruct an ext. retension dev.)
(and hope the material is not too wrinkled)

Anyway, it's amazing how zero torque media can mess it self by torque.

Positive part is that I found winworldpc, good source for abandonware.
(pc-tools nor ez_tape is behaving, obviously)
(floppy installation system is not accepting HD subdirs after offering them)

Of course also, one tape that possibly have something more important is from compressed vol.
Positive part is that 7-zip should do Stac,
negative is that starting point counted from header is not matching.

The controller of today is AIC-7880 but it seems to be too new.
Other possibility is Symbios something ISA, HP scanner related, not good eighter.

Finally it seems that finding the matching stuff is more time consuming than reverse engineering the dd read data structure.

[mk]

Not good.

I'm already mechanically clipped possibly most important tape and burned one drive.
(still one available)
Also ordered few eeproms for HC drive stabbing and of course wrote some code and extracted what was possible.

Seems that the end-of-data mark is quite hard to omit.

Luckily I never moved to dat.
(still have that HP C1525F)

[thesameguy]

Oof. This is why I never store old stuff on old media. I have stuff from the floppy days stored on bluray. When I stop using a technology, I move whatever I had stored on it to whatever technology is replacing it. Floppy->Tape->ZIP->CD->DVD->bluray and probably pretty soon once prices come down just a little more ->flash.