Assembler has a bunch, and now I have a bunch, so I figure it's time to talk about them. There are tons of different types of tapes, some drives have backwards-read capability, some don't so obviously its important to note which ones you have. I've started to order the hardware that I need, but really that is the easier part. What tips do you guys have to get everything calibrated and working as it should? Obviously, you don't want to go first with a valuable tape. Any particular software to do raw dumps (and to access them), when we don't know the format of the backups? And any other tips that you think might be useful. It's breaking new ground for me, so hoping everything goes smoothly.
I'd connect the drives to a Linux machine and image the tapes completely (via dd or ddrescue). You can then examine and pull apart the images versus the tapes themselves. The image may hold clues as to what software was used to make the tape: magic strings or headers. The commercial backup formats are probably fairly proprietary and opaque. If encryption was used on the backup the data is gone forever. :\ If you have LTO tapes in general LTO drives can read one generation back, so an LTO3 drive can read LTO2 but not LTO1.
Luckily these companies seem to have used some public formats. Im still digging around what CDs I have from them to see if there are any clues of the actual format. Linux will probably be a good thing to setup for this.
