I do not envy you right now, alot of work ahead.. but it seems it will be worth it.. My suggestion (as mentioned before in this thread) is buy a drive that works, put through a cleaning tape write then read a tape. once that is all done dump maybe the first 10mb of the tape to a binary file (simple with linux), and hopefully someone will be able to figure out what data backup methods were used, if it was backup exec, just tar, or something encrypted. I am sure that there will be multiple servers backed up and multiple backup methods Wish i was in the same country as you (and still hoarded server gear..) The other 100% safe option is to go through a data recovery service funded by everyone but i dont think that is financially viable as mentioned... Hopefully someone able to travel to you with the relevant expertise will be able to assist you in testing a tape drive and analysing the tapes and then recovering the data... if its not encrypted.
Gruelius is saying what I feel is two solutions I agree on. Find the right tape drives, cleaning equipment and test tapes (last part maybe a good test for also software and how to work with these things)
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. Just get a drive, in any condition, and get a few "disposable" tapes to go with it. Read a few of the disposable tapes through the drive half a dozen times, then do a couple of read-write tests. If it all checks out, read the real tape data in. No need to be overly cautious. If you run into a tape or two that's problematic to read, or is in really poor condition, send just those few tapes off to someone with more professional hardware if necessary, but I see absoluely no reason why a second hand drive from ebay or wherever else can't do this job.
I would really love to see these tapes dumped, and would be especially curious about any code that may be uncovered in the process. If time/money is an issue, I would bet that many would help out with contributions. (I'm ready to donate a bit to get the wheels in motion.) What needs to happen to get this moving?
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)
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.
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. 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. 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.
Looking back at this thread, there was more said after here that seems to have been lost. There was a forum attack recently or something I heard? Anyway, I want to repeat a few points I made for the record: 1. If we simply get a compatible drive in any condition, with some disposable tapes, and run the disposable tapes through the drive half a dozen times doing read/write tests to check the drive out and refresh the heads, the risk to the archived tapes is minimal. 2. Any compression, if even present, will be lightweight, since it needed to be able to compress large volumes of data on the fly with very limited resources in the day, usually on a non-dedicated server while it was busy doing other tasks. My money is on run length encoding only. 3. If it's encrypted or compressed, it's easy to determine by looking at the raw data itself, and if it's compressed, the compression algorithm should be easy enough to reverse with some basic analysis. 4. Whatever file system is used, it's little more than a thin index of names and offsets, with the real file data making up 99.9% of the content. Regardless of the file system used, it should be easy to extract the data from raw tape dumps, we just need those dumps first. Basically, I want to emphasize the next step is simply to get a drive, in any condition, run a few junk tapes over the heads, then read in some raw tape data. I bet if I had some raw tape dumps in my hands right now, and if they weren't striped or I had all the striped parts, I could rip the content within a day. At the very least, I'd be able to work out what the next step is in the recovery process.
There's a few things to remember with these. 1.These were found 3 years ago, if something was gonna happen it would have probably happened by now 2.Assembler paid for this stuff himself, he only put up a fund-raiser to release the disc assets, no such fund-raiser has been done for the tapes so he's under no obligation to do anything 3.Even if they get dumped we're talking about entire daily server backups here, we're talking a lot of data to sift through to remove personal and sensitive information (payroll for example, all that stuff), and that's not even touching on how to organise duplicate data which there will no doubt be a lot of. Requires a lot of time, a lot of dedication, a lot of disk space to keep a "raw" backup and a "clean" version. I'd like to see this stuff shared too but i'm not holding hope for it.
Well it's also true that these tapes have absolutely no value whatsoever themselves, it's only the contents that are of interest. Since not even Assembler appears to have dumped them yet, it stands to reason that he bought them because he intends to extract the contents, and since tapes don't last forever, he no doubt intends to do that sooner or later. Whether he intends to share it for free or not is another matter entirely, but when it comes to dumping the tapes, it just seems to be a lack of time, interest, equipment, or know-how, or maybe a bit of all these, that's stopped it happening yet. I just think the answer is don't over-think things, just get some hardware and dump some tapes, and worry about interpreting the data and extracting actual files once you've at least dumped some data. It really doesn't have to be that hard. We aren't talking about a 1000 year old document that needs to be preserved in a vacuum, we're talking about a bunch of old magnetic tapes that can be thrown straight in the bin after one good data read.
He didn't just buy the tapes though, they were part of a lot auction. Here, you can see some more of what was acquired from the auctions - http://www.youtube.com/user/ASSEMblerEX/search?query=acclaim
No, it was an auction with well over a thousand lots (even the building in NY), and he bid on several lots. These tapes were just chucked in a lot with a bunch of random computer items, though.
It might be a good idea to get on this soon though, at least the older tapes, before they deteriorate beyond being able to be read.
Several people said they would donate spare drives but no one ever came through. Any suggested drives?
