Comments on: Or Reuse the Tapes (Backing Up’s Dirty Secret)

By: Lazlo Nibble

Lazlo Nibble — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 06:45:21 +0000

I have this fantasy gadget. It’s like the pickup on an optical scanner, but instead of measuring light it measures magnetic flux. It’s very very high resolution and extremely sensitive. When you pass a magnetic medium over this gadget (or pass the gadget over a magnetic medium) the output is like an “image” of the magnetic fields on that medium. If you have that, you never need to track down the original hardware again: decoding the content is just a software problem. Archivists would sacrifice limbs for something like this.

By: Kieron

Kieron — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 05:58:36 +0000

I had to store some tape backuped PC stuff in 1995…I decided if anyone ever wanted to restore it they would find it nearly impossible, so I stored THE WHOLE SYSTEM (CPU fully loaded with all software incl. the opsys, tape drive, etc.) offsite in one big box.

By: Flack

Flack — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 01:25:56 +0000

If you are looking for old tape backup software, let me know. I have archives too.

By: Jason Scott

Jason Scott — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:29:16 +0000

You have misjudged me. I’d gladly put stuff up if I was able to successfully pull of binary images. In fact, I even downloaded just such a program to try, and was unsuccessful. This is all more about the problem that exists in backups than this particular issue, which is one of dozens I face in projects.

By: Patrick Yeon

Patrick Yeon — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 05:52:27 +0000

I know this probably goes against some deeply ingrained need to sort, categorize, and see everything you’ve got there first, but if not, let the internet do it for you. Can you get binary dumps of these tapes (equivalent to a CD’s .iso) and just throw them up, as a challenge to anbody that can extract the files from them?

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 03:24:01 +0000

I can recall the tape backups that we used at one of my jobs long ago being notoriously unreliable..after a certain number of cycles, the tapes just wouldn’t work anymore. Unfortunately, back in the days of 100 megabyte hard drives, before CD-Rs and flash drives, tapes were the only economical way to backup mass amounts of data.

Good luck Jason, I hope your tape trove yields many treasures.

By: andy v (phoenix)

andy v (phoenix) — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 02:30:58 +0000

Are those QIC-40/80 tapes? I still actually have a drive for those, although I haven’t used it in a while.. I had a DOS program for it, but it worked under Win98 just fine. I’d have to dig deeper to figure out just what program that was and who made the drive, and I think the tapes I had may be gone now.. but I’m betting those are QICs..

By: Shannon Harris

Shannon Harris — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 02:09:14 +0000

I had a hard time recently just trying to recover data from 1998 that was backed up on ZIP100 disks. I had my old Zip drive, but could not find the power cord. I ended up transferring about 10 of those disks worth of data onto a thumb drive at Kinkos.

By: Michael Kohne

Michael Kohne — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 01:46:35 +0000

I once did a co-op (many moons ago) where I was required to move some data off of the 8″ floppies onto 5 1/4″s. Fortunately, my boss grabbed (from somewhere in the building) an old CP/M computer that had 2 8″ drives and 2 5 1/4″ drives. It even had software to do the transfer.

I ended up having to guess at which of the dozens of formats that it supported to use.

Not fun.

By: Josef Kenny

Josef Kenny — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 23:59:50 +0000

I was given a task a few months ago to move an entire backup archive of various documents over a 3 or 4 year period off of 3.5" floppies. By far the hardest stage (more so than the tedious feeding of disks) was simply finding out how they were formatted and what godawful proprietary backup program had archived the data. As for the "Restoring Machine" idea, somebody on Slashdot had a similar one, http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/20/0324255