posted by retro on Aug 24, 2013:
Nemesis said:
I think something just needs to be done about this rather than sitting on it waiting for a "perfect" drive. The waiting is doing more damage than anything at this point.
As long as they're kept in ideal conditions, they should be OK. Most problems are due to the amount of times the tape has passed through a drive and the state of the drive's transport mechanism. Using an unknown drive could be disastrous.
CodeAsm said:
There are multuple type of drives needed and the tapes are recorded using diferent type of software. This is what i remember of this thread and other conversations. It means we need alott of type of drives and the right software to get the backups back, i wonder if those backups can be browsed at all. So we need to find those drives abd software, some test tapes and pray to the backup gods its al good. Only then i rememver Assrmvler wanted to dump the real tapes. I think start with what info we got and get some working drives and tapes. And find software. And a non destructive way to determine wich software was used. I still have hope, but it will take time.(op or friends may correct me on any point here, as im not 100% sure)
Pretty much. We don't necessarily know what OS the computer system ran, whether the tapes were encrypted etc. If the tapes are stored correctly, then taking time to ensure everything is right before touching the tapes is preferable - there's absolutely no advantage to rushing in willy-nilly.
Nemesis said:
The tape backups almost certainly aren't compressed given the era, in which case the data format becomes almost a non-issue. Whatever the storage format, it can be reversed and the files peiced together from some basic analysis of the dumped data. All you need is some hardware which can read the tapes and take a "raw" dump of the data, then someone with some experience in this kind of data analysis (like me for example), and we should be able to extract the information out. In fact, this would probably be the starting point even if you wanted to use the correct software to unpack the data. If you don't know what software was used, you'd have to do some analysis on the data to figure that out.
Actually, compression was MORE likely back then - smaller storage meant there was more need for compression. Format IS an issue - you're assuming the server ran Windows, aren't you? It isn't necessarily FAT. As I've said countless times before, there was also proprietary hardware back then - it looks like one format, but in fact it's something completely different. The main problem with software is whether it was encrypted.
