From 1988 to 2001ish I have a huge box containing their data archive. Hundreds of tapes Too much for one person to do. Ideas?
The only thing I can think of is sell a 'lucky dip' of tapes to other members and allow them to process and share what's on them (sell 10 tapes to one person, 10 to another, etc). But that's an issue if you want to keep the tapes.
Oh just realised I forgot to add the part where the people who buy them take the data off the tapes. Then again, there is a risk the data still doesn't get released.
Maybe you could pay someone else to process them. If it were a professional whose job it was to process the files, then the chances of him just keeping the tapes for himself or whatever would be fairly slim. You could have them copy all of the data to hard drives and then you could categorize what's in there and make a poll or something to see what people want to be released. If it takes too long just to figure out what's in there, then you could send out the hard drives to other people and then they could collectively sort through it. The worst case scenario if you did that would be that you lose the data on the hard drives, but you would still have the tapes. Of course all of that would cost a good deal of money. I guess it depends on how much you want the stuff to be released.
I had the idea of trustworthy people acquiring one of the kind of drives we need. That person would be sent a few tapes to do and share. There are at least 15 kinds of tapes.We would have the 15 people each with a drive and work from there. That or do the 80's first as it may be the most interesting.
Assemblers Idea is good. What kind of brands are these Tapes? I mean what kind of drives do we need? I think the 80s and 90s are very interesting. It sounds like that this 14TB data are the full Company Backup. Thats a huge amount of Data so it wont be so easy to ditribute it. I mean it was not very easy to share 45 GB of data and to have 14TB to save all this is highly unlikely. I guess it will be better to just share very interesting Things like artworks alpha or beta versions or sourcecode of games or unrelesed games at the beginning. I guess there is also some Business Data (Numbers and Calculations) there, i dont know how interesting this is to share? Do have the tapes some password protection?
I could always fish out my old tape drives, I'd be willing to up the challenge, mind giving details on what tapes these are?
Just my two cents: I'd think there's gonna be lots of duplicates in there, so restoring/reading the tapes chronologically would make the most sense. That way it'd be possible to only distribute new/changed files instead of each tape's whole contents. At the very least, they should be grouped by age, though I guess that's gonna happen automagically anyways, due to the tapes staying of the same type for a period of a few years (unless maybe Acclaim switched backup hardware around like crazy, but "15 types of tape" over a few decades sounds reasonable). Speaking of new/changed files, probably most interesting in the case of source code - how the heck would one organize that into a "flat" file system hierarchy? Any ideas? 45GB is nothing, I've handled torrents upwards of 100GB with a few even going above 200, without (major) problems. (I didn't like the idea of splitting it into chunks, that then get wrapped into DVD images, but beggars can't be choosers, right?). I agree that 14TB would be way too big though, even if you take into account the likelihood of dupes like I mentioned above, which would decrease that amount somewhat. Maybe do it MAMEburners-like, i.e. physically mailing HDs around? If someone thinks it'd be a good idea to torrent it anyways later, why not, and there'd already be some other people around to help seed.
the earlyist tapes should take prioraty because they are in the most danger and given that tapes expire after 5 or 10 years from that era so there is a good chane the early years are already lost my suggestion would be start a donashion goal pool to buy a few cheep computers that can fit the tap dives as well as to get the tape drives in the first place and enough 3 TB drives to fill the need and just start riping the crap out of the data and burning it to dvd or blu-ray then relise
i never worked with tape drives so far. can i just stick the tape in and press copy all over to HD then sort the files or is it more complicated?
well some tapes look like 8 tracks but hold something like 1 gig or more some look like mini VHS or VHS-c and can hold upwords of 5 gigs some look like large casset tapes and can hold upwords of 10 gigs and the most modern ones look like a standerd casset tape and can hold 50+ gigs wikipedia can explin it better and much more bust basicly yah it woks just like copying from a flash drive just much slower
Once we ignore stuff like book keeping we will have less data, after all roms were 32mbit< in the 80's
I can't imagine source and binaries taking up the vast majority of all of that. I'd assume there would be source and binaries in various stages of development taking up some of the space - maybe. Likely you're right and it is bookkeeping as well as the Temporary Internet Files cache from IE4 featuring low resolution porn thumbnails. As it stands I've still got 1.21TB of harddrive space available. I wouldn't mind dropping some cash on a tape drive as I'm a whore for obsolete media formats. Just bought my first 8 track last week - Johnny Carson show recordings featuring, amongst others, Richard Nixon. Now to get an 8-track player...
Kevin, they are labeld? Can you sort them by year? After that i would sort out for each year the different types of tapes and how many and then see who has the right Tapedrives to copy it. I think this should be not so hard. about the space, i think that most ppl are most interested in artworks roms sourcecode and design documents.
a little over a year ago a business that was doing some renovations on was upgrading their computers and one of the computers had one of these tape drives on it and they gave the whole tower to me. It literally hasn't moved since I brought it home. so its untested right now but when I get back home next week I could test it out and see if it might be usable for such a project? You could do it similar to what was stated before but instead of the persons buying the tapes they are just dumping them then with the idea of the donation use the money from that to cover the persons return shipping to you? with a hard copy of the data on DVD as well just an idea
As for the space requirements, I'm curious as to how much of the tapes are empty and how many of them aren't compressed in the least. Good backup strategies involve having a few months worth of backups but usually not keeping everything indefinitely. Likely some of the tapes are just the night before the next tapes backup and you'll find a newer revision of the same source on each etc. Very interesting I'm sure, especially if someone can setup a source repository to be able to properly look at all of the source based upon revisions. Possible the later tapes even have something of the sort backed up onto them.
Depends on the backup software used of course (that could be another issue, btw...), but generally speaking... You know drive imaging software? Think of it kinda like that, you put in the tape, you start a restore, afterwards all the files are whereever you restored the backup to. There's usually no easy way to just "look around" on the tapes themselves etc. to see what's on there. Restoring single files is possible but annoying, since you have to start from the beginning of the tape and then keep spooling til one the files you want happens to come along... APE mentioned compression, which is a good point. AFAIK important backups on tape usually aren't compressed very much, or even not at all, so as not to lose too much data if part of a tape goes bad for some reason. Meaning there's probably a lot of breathing room to be gained by applying some "proper" compression afterwards.
