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?