Any software to read from old backup tapes?

[Guest]

Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage (More info?)

Does anyone know of any software to quickly read and restore data from
old backup tapes (DC2120 family)? The Veritas/BackupMyPC software is
unbelievably slow. It can take an hour to read a directory of what's on
the tape, and literally days to try and restore it.

I'm looking for something simple, preferably command-line driven, that
would simply take all the data on the tape, and write it to a folder on
a hard disk, creating new folders as needed to match the folder
structure on the tape. Any file that is readable would be written to
the hard disk. Files that are unreadable due to errors are OK to skip.

If there is no software ready-made for this purpose, perhaps there is
documentation on the QIC API that would enable me to write a quick and
dirty program?

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage (More info?)

h7qvnk7q001@sneakemail.com wrote:

> Does anyone know of any software to quickly read and restore data from
> old backup tapes (DC2120 family)? The Veritas/BackupMyPC software is
> unbelievably slow. It can take an hour to read a directory of what's on
> the tape, and literally days to try and restore it.
>
> I'm looking for something simple, preferably command-line driven, that
> would simply take all the data on the tape, and write it to a folder on
> a hard disk, creating new folders as needed to match the folder
> structure on the tape. Any file that is readable would be written to
> the hard disk. Files that are unreadable due to errors are OK to skip.
>
> If there is no software ready-made for this purpose, perhaps there is
> documentation on the QIC API that would enable me to write a quick and
> dirty program?

(a) If the tape was originally written using BackupMyPC then you don't need
information about the tape drive, you need information about the data
format, especially if the data was software-compressed.

(b) It's slow because the drive is slow. 120 meg is not a lot of data today
but it was when those drives were new. And that technology was slow even
then. Many of the drives attached to the diskette controller and were
restricted to diskette speeds. And if yours is one of the expensive ones
with an interface board the interfaces are usually proprietary so drivers
are a problem.

(c) If the tape was not originally written using BackupMyPC then you need to
find out what was used and do whatever you need to do to get it to work.

--
--John
to email, dial "usenet" and validate
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)