I have 300 data tapes of many formats from acclaim from 1989? to the bankruptcy. Clearly this is beyond the means of any one person to handle. Any suggestions?
I would first start with cataloguing the models / serials (if there are any), organizing them per vendor / model. Then I would start looking for the correspondant dat readers. Once there is a reader for a kind of tape, start copying each single dat to a HD, maybe considering getting more drives of the same kind to copy more tapes simultaneously. My offer for help is still valid
Shame you didn't say this 6 months ago, we cleared out what looked like a museum collection of tape drives going back decades.
Please let us know the types of tapes that you have so we don't throw away any more tape drives that you may need. I have access to several older tape drives.
When I was recovering the old Sega archives from 1994, I did encounter a ton of passworded stuff. Mostly zips and databases. In my cases the passwords were dumb and really easy to crack (highlights include 'satan', 'vermin', 'catfish'), so hopefully that will be the case with your stuff. For old stuff (aforementioned databases, etc.) I recommend the Passware suite, they have Lotus and Filemaker crackers (this can be reaaaaaly useful). For zips... Visual Zip Password Recovery Processor. It was pretty fast, fastest I could find, really. I hear Jack the Ripper is good but I didn't use it. BTW I still volunteer to help you with going through the drives
first giant backup of everything can be read. second trying to recover damaged datas. and i fear there will be alot of them... third catalogation.
Quite a bit of tapes, there. Backing them up can be a time consuming prospect. Here is what I would do: 1. Sort them based on type of reader required 2. Visually inspect for interesting labels. Not sure how they are labeled if they are labelled at all, but any hints that one contains interesting content should be flagged, and the reader for that tape should be located first. 3. Transfer data to local HDD - begin whatever decryption process required. No experience here. 4. Back-up to DVD: Most older tapes can easy fit on a disc now, so this can not only create easy-to-read and catalog backups but will free up HDD space. 5. Anything of interest: share it
send some out to trusted members who offer their help and have tape drives...and then we need something like a ftp or something and for password cracking, i can offer my help i also have some tape drives
300? woo... this is gonna be a long work... sorry, i cannot help here. don't have anything close to a tape drive. (does a VCR count ^^?)
Well all that stuff should be backupt somehow, thats for sure otherwise that material will get lost somewhen. Since that is a huge amount, you can not do it alone i guess. so maybe you should consider to get some help from trusted persons. Akklaim had lots of cool and even lot of shit games, so i guess that the tapes can offer lot of cool material even some we never know that someting like this was in development. I bet there is nice Turok Stuff on it or the Sources to N64 Shadowman. The N64 engines they where not bad They also hat Mortal Kombat Stuff at the SNES Ära
The difficulty won't be in cracking the actual files, it will be simply reading the tapes. Even if you have a suitable drive, the tape won't necessarily be recoverable without a copy of the original backup program and truthfully, it's not likely they used something still in use like TAR, at least not until the mid 90s--more than likely they originally used a random commercial 16-bit Windows package.
Company credit card numbers, financial data, server data, etc. Employee social security numbers... ID thieves dream!!
Couldnt it be that the software used for backing up on tape camed with the drive itself? Considering the old fashion way of hardware vendors, this sounds credible to me?
