reading old tapes

[Tom Buskey]

On Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 10:12 AM, Neil Joseph Schelly <neil at jenandneil.com>
wrote:

> I've got a pile of old Travan tapes at work with unknown contents.  Before
> I
> retire our last machine with a Travan drive, I'm trying to make an honest
> effort at recovering any potential data on these tapes so that I can
> figure
> out if there's anything valuable on them.


The 1st thing I'd do is dd them to files.  There's the chance you can only
read them X times.
I've had issues with 4mm tapes that broke after 10 uses because of shoe
shining.

I can use dd to read the tape device and just looking at the data, it's
> clearly a backup of some sort, but I can't identify the type. Amanda
> doesn't
> seem to recognize the drive type, tar/bunzip2/gunzip all can't recognize
> the
> data.  The file program just reports that it is data.
>

dump?  cpio?  pax?.  All these will work on a dd'd file.
A few backup programs use modified GNU tar (Veritas NetBackup, BackBone
NetVault).
Legato is proprietary.
Do you know they were created in Linux and not Windows?
Look for backup software that came with travan drives.

Has anyone ever had to identify tape contents without knowing how it was
> written?  Have I missed anything obvious here?


In the ancient past I've had issues with block sizes in dump/tar.  There
could be endianness issues from different CPU architectures.
I'd guess the travan tapes were on x86 though.


>
> -N
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