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I've never used tape drives before. For work I have to transfer some data from old Exabyte cassettes to a hard drive using an Exabyte tape drive reader. I don't have more information than this at the moment, but has anyone ever done something like this before and know how to go about it?

Thanks in advance!

mharris7190
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  • We need much more information before we can answer this. FOr starters: Which tape drive is it? Which interface (SAS? SCSI?). Do you have a computer which a matching hostadaptor? WHich program wrote the data to the tape and in which format? Is it encrypted? If so, do you have the password to decrypt it? Etc etc. Also, is the tape backup described in your coorperations disaster recovery document? (Theyt usually are, look in your safe for that document) – Hennes May 11 '13 at 20:36
  • Thanks, I will be getting this information on monday. Please stay tuned. – mharris7190 May 11 '13 at 22:13

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You really do need to provide more information, but if you don't have it, and if you're in Linux, start with some of the below. Note that different Unixen have very different tape device (/dev/*) naming conventions, and that the leading letters often specify whether the tape autorewinds after a use, uses/expects compression, etc.

dd if=/dev/rst0 bs=1024 of=data  # use the right /dev/* for your drive
                                 # and try 512 instead of 1024
ls -l data   # look for the output being at least bs=<whatever> bytes long
file data    # this may produce info on what format data is on the tape
less data    # also may provide some idea of the data format

or:

tar tvf /dev/rst0   # same /dev/* note as above

These may provide useful info, but only if you're lucky, there are a lot of different formats the data could be in, and many ways said data could be written to the tape.

Alex North-Keys
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