[PLUG-TALK] Reading old cartridge and exabyte tapes

[Keith Lofstrom]

I'm finally getting around to recovering the data from some
old QIC and 8mm exabyte backup tapes that have been in my
storage locker for up to 20 years.  I suspect most will expire
in a cloud of shredded plastic and magnetic dust.  Which could
screw up the few QIC and exabyte drives that remained in my
locker.  I had more, but they must have disappeared in a
cleanup.  Bad planning.  

I'm guessing my recovery of 300 or so tapes will yield a few
hundred gigabytes of very redundant data;  I will use rsync
to whittle it down.  Some of the old DOS and NT tapes used
SYTOS (abandonware) and NOVASTOR.  I may be writing some
Perl scripts to massage the tape blocks back into files.
It is doubtful that I can convince a copy of DOS running
these programs in virtualbox to talk to a SCSI device.

So, assuming the remaining drives die before I get through
all the tapes, do anyone of you have old exabyte and QIC
drives that you want to get rid of, perhaps in return for the
recovery of data from a few of your own stashed-away tapes?

Keith

P.S., note to Michael:  I don't see any BSDI media in there,
but some of the BSDI machine backups probably include sources
for BSDI and maybe even X11, which you were looking for.  
I won't know until I look.

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com