Help restoring from old tape backups

K

kandor

Gawd
Joined
Aug 24, 2005
Messages
632
Hi,

I have some old tapes that are supposed to have data on them from 2002, but no one remembers what was used to create them. There are 2 kinds of tapes. TRAVAN-8 and ADR2 cartridges.

I built up an old system, bought the 2 tape drives and installed an older os (vista) that has ntbackup.

I've tried nt backup, tapeawareEX and a freeware Z-d backup.

The tapes are seen and accessible, but no software finds anything on the tapes. I'm not sure what to try next, software wise? Any ideas? These backups were from 2002 and 2003.

Thanks!
 
If you have one of the on stream ADR2 drives, that shipped with Yosemite Tapeware XE but was also supported by much older versions of backup exec. Depending on which Travan drive brand and capacity you have it could be any of.a few packages but most of them came with proprietary versions of the older Colorado Backup software (Colorado, HP & iOmega) I don't know of any current software which would allow you to read in raw tape blocks to try to ascertain the header format which may give you some better direction. If the data is irreplaceable and important you might contact one of the larger data translation/restoration/migration services out there like iron mountain.
 
backup exec was popular at that time.

however unless those tapes have been EXTREMELY well taken care of i doubt they have any usable data left on them. my restore record from tape was never better much than 70% back then and that was usually on tapes stored in a climate controlled tape vault.
 
Hi, thanks so much for the info! I've tried to find an old backup exec but no luck, the new veritas trialware wont install on a desktop, only on a server. So I'm not able to try it. Tapeware I did try because it came with the ADR2 drive. Everyway I've tried so far provides no clue that it sees any data, or table of contents etc. I'll keep looking!
 
You might need to go even older than Vista which came out 4 years after when those tapes are from. Being tapes I'd venture to guess it might have been a server running Windows Server 2000 and likely as mentioned was probably using Backup Exec for the tape backups. I actually have some old Backup Exec install discs around somewhere from back then as well as Windows Server 2000. I can put my hands on the Microsoft discs pretty quick and easy since I still have a bunch of old binders full of them (TechNet Action Pack binders) but finding the old Backup Exec discs will take some digging and hunting to find.

Actually I just looked on eBay out of curiosity and you can find both on there...... Windows Server 2000 and Backup Exec 8.6 or so for around ten to twenty bucks each.
 
Hi MixmanSC, thanks for the info, I've gone back to a new XP install and then under xp tried the following: zDat dump, uraninium backup, tape administrator and iperius backup, and the builtin NT backup. In most cases the software can see the tape but never finds anything, I'd love to try backupexec on server 2000 but I'll have to see what's involved in that. I downloaded a new trial of backup exec but it will only install on a server so I wasn't able to try it.
 
Yeah it would have been very uncommon to see a tape backup drive in any sort of a desktop PC. Generally you would have only seen them in servers and in that time frame the server would have likely been running either Windows Server 2000 or Windows NT Server. The most common backup software around then for mainstream commercial server use was Backup Exec. I managed backups using Backup Exec for many years using it to drive anything from single DAT drives, Travan drives, LTO, 5 tape LTO changer, to a 650(ish) slot StorageTek L700e library with 20 LTO drives in it (actually this one we ran with Veritas NetBackup). Its been years since I've messes with any of them though - I've been out of IT since around 2002.
 
My best result was on the travan-8 tapes, backup exec can read tape 2 , 3 and 4 but always ask to insert tape1, which it then says is unreadable :(
 
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