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Catch-22, or “don’t keep the only copy of the software on the tape”
Posted by Mark on Oct 20, 2008
Ever had one of those days where having tried to do everything correctly that nasty stomach churning feeling becomes overwhelming as you realise that there is a major problem and a simple restore could now be a major tape data recovery issue.
You have the backup tape, you have the tape drives, but the only copy of the backup software is within a backup set on the tape and this backup is from 14 years ago and the software is not sold any more.
QicStream was a popular backup-up application in the early 1990s but by 2008 it had not been available for many years. Having given up on eBay and the chance that someone is still selling a copy, what can be done?
The answer is quite simple, if you have a compiler, in depth knowledge of tape backup methodologies, and have seen data from the particular application before. In this case we were able to perform a raw read from the tape, analyse the data, then create a utility to restore the files. Quite whether this classed as a reasonably straightforward tape recovery, or a rather nasty data conversion, I’m not sure. What it does highlight is a problem that we periodically see, “how do you store data for the long term?”
In this case the data was stored on a DC6150 quarter-inch data cartridge. This was not leading edge even then, and now, I think, not many people would recognise one. More to the point, where would you find a drive? Backwards compatibility with tape drives usually goes back a couple of generations, but not 7 or 8 as the case here. The latest SLR tape drive would probably just spit the tape back out, and would never be able to read the data.
Then there is the data to consider, this was written to the tape using a piece of software that had not been available for many years, and the version they had used was only supplied on 5.25″ diskette and ran only under MS-DOS. Even if they had retained the original copy of the software there could have been problems with the diskettes decaying and becoming unreadable, with finding a 5.25″ diskette drive, or a PC to run MS-DOS.
There is much more to retaining data than simply keeping a backup in a safe place, at some point there might be a need to restore the data and this could well require that you have retained a working tape drive, an accessible copy of the backup software and a suitable system upon which to run it.
