[PLUG-TALK] Reading old cartridge and exabyte tapes

Russell Senior russell at personaltelco.net
Mon Jan 4 05:01:44 UTC 2016


>>>>> "Keith" == Keith Lofstrom <keithl at gate.kl-ic.com> writes:

Keith> [...]

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

I have an 8mm and DC600 QIC tape drives (and 4mm DDS, DDS2 and DDS3,
iirc), but not that I want to get rid of.  The 4mm drive I dug out
helped someone recover data from their 20 year old backups during OSCON
2014.  These were simple tar backups, the only sticky bit was guessing
the blocking size (10k, which was a common choice back then).

I recall finding a document that described the SYTOS format once upon a
time, probably sufficient to decode.  But that was a *long* time ago, no
idea if it still exists or if my memory is accurate.  Most of the DC600
cardridges I have are SYTOS format.


-- 
Russell Senior, President
russell at personaltelco.net



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