We have finally a lot of tape drives inbound. I will be drawing on all of your experience to dump the tapes.
i picked up a dds4 tape drive yesterday to play with so i cant really help with experience but i am interested in what data could/will be found on thoose tapes
I'm interested to know whats on em as well. Assembler, if you need any more Drives let me know what you don't have and/or need. I am assuming others have sent enough.
I'd recommend testing each drive using a tape you don't care about. You wouldn't want to lose data on a tape cart just because you didn't verify that the drive worked properly before trying to get the info off of it. The two main problems you can run into are the tape being eaten (obviously) and with some brands (like Iomega) the tape despooling.