Even MORE retro tapes! Recovering ancient data from QIC 80, QIC 3020, and beyond.

[@techhoppy]

Ahhhhh!! I thought for sure in this video you’d show us how you extracted the data from these binary blobs!! PLEASE do a video on that if you would kind sir!!

[@paulcarboneNY]

Agreed - I'd love to hear more about the extraction process as well please!

[@skjerk]

Yeah, that's kinda the holy grail of this!

[@rrpiva]

Yes, please. Thanks!

[@janpedersen9120]

same here also why i really down voted video, begin of video i though that was the real reason for doing a video to show how ppl can actually handle data and not just a hear my tapedrive and listen to a story.

[@troyfowler5177]

Wow! Hearing that old drive spin that tape takes me back! The very first tech support gig I had was for Colorado Memory Systems, supporting DOS, 3.1 and 95. Fun fact: If you run the original Colorado software in Windows and click the About menu, you will get the Colorado Mem Sys logo. If you double right click on the sun in the logo, you will have an asteroids like game controlled with the arrow keys.

[@cmonkey63]

A tape backup that can be successfully read 25 years later is definitely a good backup.

[@flagger2020]

Yep, between lack of retention runs and rewrites to prevent loss due to write through errors. So the tapes must have been stored well, and their cases did their job well.

[@Davesvinyl]

i'm so glad this channel come up on my timeline. very enjoyably to watch

[@stpworld]

I do still use dat and LTO tape i send dats to my uncle to store in his bank vault. My old gateway has a tape drive in it but I have not run it for years.

[@tenminutetokyo2643]

Ditto yeah! I remember it well when it first came out.

[@Neksus-M06]

My personal, non professional experience, was of a consumer toy borrowed from an enterprise solution. It was annoying to deal with and all the data that could have been interesting to save was easy to backup on 3.5 floppies. But stepping up the level it was a cheap solution, albeit slow as death. You are helping me come to terms with "ancient' tape storage :) LOL Great work!

[@chiminmao2620]

I have a 68010 based cup board running with Multibus. It also has mc68450 and mc68451 installed on board. It claims that this board is ready for Unisoft UNIX. I m expecting to have this tape to try.

[@iamdkk]

would love a dump of the 68k unix tape. Wondering if any of the binaries would run on Amiga UNIX or A/UX.... I wonder what the hardware platform was....

[@geos_one]

the big tape could you look if it is for a plexus system take a look at adrians digital basement he is at the moment recovering a plexus p/20 an motorola 68000 system.

[@CommentConqueror]

I like these videos

[@ForgottenMachines]

1:05 We ALWAYS think that's interesting. Convergent Technologies' MiniFrame, MightyFrame & UNIX PC all ran UNIX versions on Motorola 68000 processors, and I've hunted those OS tapes for years! Any idea what brand/make the machine is that this UNIX system was made for?

[@chiminmao2620]

I have a 68010 based cup board running with Multibus. It also has mc68450 and mc68451 installed on board. It claims that this board is ready for UNIX. I m expecting to have this tape to try.

[@BandanazX]

back in the 90s warez scene we standardized on the backup program included in win9x. worked great. oh the days of tape swapping warez meetups

[@grantbanstead1971]

BackupExec was the longest lasting high quality backup software that started on DOS and moved through Windows often behind other brand names.

[@jp-ny2pd]

I had one of those 250mb colorado drives back in the BBS days. Originally there was a door program that would let users download files from the tape. Later I got a couple of NEC cd-rom changers and the tapes became just backups. They worked well other then they were slow as dirt cause of the floppy interface.

[@PeymanDadkhah-uz7im]

Hi there, your unix tape may work on old mvme68k and vme147 processor board.Do you have a dump or image that can make a duplicate of bootable unix systemv/68 ? I will be glad to test it on my 90's mvme68 hardware.Thank you in advance

[@flapjack9495]

OK, so tell us more about the software you used to extract the data!

[@fillg]

I sold and installed a lot of the Colorado floppy controller based drives but was always frustrated by how slow they were because of the limited abilities of the controller. I didn't buy my own until they came out with the ones that hooked to my IDE controller, MUCH faster!

[@deepsleep7822]

@Dmitry: on Linux, what command did you use to read the tape? Thanks.

[@DmitryBrant]

Well the command to read the tape is very simple: "dd if=/dev/nqft0 of=tape.bin" The big hurdle was to compile and load the "ftape" driver, so that the tape device (/dev/nqft0) becomes available. You might find ancient distros that have ftape bundled in them, but it wouldn't be the "latest" version of ftape. To get the latest version working, you need to do actual kernel hacking (at least I did).

[@Jerrec]

Do you still have the Motorola Bootstrap Tape? Do you sell it?

[@Kardall]

My curiosity is sated! thank you! Also, that Unix software would be neat to fiddle with since most people have never run a Unix operating system. It's pretty different compared to a Linux OS so. If you haven't, then I would definitely try it out. You should be able to set something like that up with QEmu because it'll let you try to emulate an actual processor. Man... Borland Delphi. I used Turbo Pascal 7.0 back in those days. That would be awesome to play around with again lol

[@j.lietka9406]

As a kind of hobby I look for electronics in dumpsters and curbside stuff. Recently found a Sony Tape Drive (SDT 9000) and a box of 5 TDK Ultrium2 200/400GB blank - unused - cassettes. Do you need special software besides drivers to read any info from these tapes? i am not sure if the TDK tapes work with the Sony.

[@DmitryBrant]

From a quick search, it looks like the SDT 9000 drive reads DAT tapes, whereas Ultrium tapes are LTO, so they wouldn't be compatible with the drive. As far as software, if you want to read the data that's currently on those tapes, you will definitely need the original software that was used to write them.

[@j.lietka9406]

@@DmitryBrant the TDK Ultrium2 tapes are unopened, unused - blank, virtually new cassettes. It's a small box of 5. I didn't find any DAT tapes when I found the Sony drive. Thank you 🤓 not sure what I can do with the Sony DAT drive. Or the TDK tapes! 🤣 I think the TDK LTO cassettes might be a slightly different size than the DAT cassettes. I don't have a reader for the TDK Ultrium2 tapes.

[@IlanUsanoV]

Hi , I have got few of qic cartridges for irix instalation of specific version for sgi iris 4d/20 pc , Can I some how read them and make back up on windows and then transfer the files to cd and use them on instalation for sgi pc?

[@DmitryBrant]

Sure, that would probably be feasible. I can certainly help with reading the data from the tapes and getting it onto a CD, if you'd like to contact me through my site: dmitrybrant.com, but beyond that I'm not familiar enough with SGI PCs to know if the installation would work.

[@deepsleep7822]

Disappointing to hear that support for these tape drives, in Linux, has been dropped. I have a QIC drive I wanted to experiment with. I used Centos a long time ago. Really liked the distro.

[@bobsbits5357]

when i got the software i did find out how slow the old drives were in the past dds 1 hell slow i had the same kind of drives you had here they did my head in to slow they do sell of silly money working

[@peteregan9750]

lol Tape drives are good for backup but very expensive lto-9 or rdx for consumers damn expensive for analog tech!

[@bobsbits5357]

nova backup can see the drive and do the drivers i have had the £25 i year soft wear black firday deal

[@medium-old]

Hi everyone, I'm currently seeking training/workshops/courses about dealing with legacy tape media? I'm interested in learning about how to work with early SCSI tech, to read and manage drives for LTO1s, DLTIV, DDS, Exabyte, QIC. Any suggestions?? Can't find much online )':

[@janpedersen9120]

i hate when ppl just leave out the important stuff like what software to handle blobs of data, the whole video just becomes hear listen to a tapedrive and me "putting in pictures" 6 out of 10, if you provided that last bit of unknown i would rate it higher. sadly i just feel i wasted time as my reason for clicking where to learn why use linux to blob the data. everyone can do that. but have a nice day, hope to hear more of the informational stuff.