25 Nov
2019
25 Nov
'19
11:40 p.m.
A few years back, I decided to go through my stack of 8mm
Exabyte-written tapes... An early Exabyte 8200 2GB Exabyte drive was
useless. A 2/5G drive worked.
There were errors on one or two tapes. But each and every one was an
analog 8mm video tape, not a real data tape. And I was able to splice
the backup set enough so that whatever it was written with would be
happy enough to restore the data once pieced back together. A mix of
tar, and ufsbackup for the most part.
During this process, I bought an Exabyte Mammoth off eBay - didn't use
it much, but it read those old tapes just fine.
I was able to recover scads of personal stuff that I already had copies
of, along with a few dumps of the USENET systems I was using to serve as
a 3-modem BBS for USENET. And yes, sometimes, I go back into old backup
tapes to recover data I already have on disk. I hate bit-rot, I do
whatever I can to mitigate it.
art k.
PS: DAT 4mm tape drives, especially whatever Sun was using, were awful.
Around 50% of them I dealt with all got into a mode within the first
year where they would accept a tape, and just kick it back out right
away. Because they were under support, they were just replaced, so I
never looked into it hardware-wise.
On 11/25/2019 12:07 PM, Al Kossow wrote:
On 11/24/19 7:24 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
So that sounds like a different problem. People
correct me if I'm
wrong but the exabyte drives seemed to have a head alignment problem.
They are 8mm
helical-head drives. they wouldn't go out of alignment by
bumping them, the worse would be the tape would lose tension if you
smacked the tensioning arms hard enough
They do have a lot of rubber parts inside.
Rollers crack and belts go soft. I have several dozen dead EX8200s from that.
I have a whole box of 8mm backup tapes that just came in, and a small
number of working drives. The Linux software I wrote to do 9 track tape recovery
from a SCSI 9 track drive works just fine on an Exabyte.
And I'm not offering to read Jason's mystery reels.