Tale of The Tape

Three tapes from a reseller in Ireland, mis-labelled, not used for 5 years, no-one remembered the back-up program used, no one was quite sure what was on the tapes, but they did know they needed some of it right now for an inspection!

That’s a challenge we respect.

The 20GB tapes were hand-labelled in classic “Weds”/”3rd tape”/”number 2″ style (i.e. meaningful at the time to the original author).  There were some scrawled dates, but we were told these were probably wrong.  Since then, the server had been replaced, the staff had moved on, the backup software had been superseded.

We generated clones of each tape and, with some low-level hex work, deduced the tapes had been written with various versions of Yosemite 6.  While old and venerable, we were unable to locate the matching versions (with bug-fix patch updates).  So we did what comes naturally next – we reverse-engineered the raw hex and extracted the tape contents using a custom program.

Three file-lists were submitted to the customer (a trade supplier of butchered meat) who was able to identify which tape (the most recent) was of most interest, and which files they wanted additional confirmation of integrity for.

There was a final twist – the most critical file was a database used by a now unsupported version of a now obsolete accounting package produced by a now defunct software house.  We got past that hurdle and customer had their key data in time for the inspection.

If you have tapes you want data recovered from, you can help by identifying the following before you call us:

• type and number of tapes,
• back-up program used,
• key folder(s),
• critical file(s)
• drop-dead date (some critical data loses all value if rescued too late – extra resources can be applied if time is tight.)