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This set of tapes was stored differently than the first batch. The first batch were kept in a basement that had a pretty stable temperature. The second batch were in a box on the second floor, which got hot in the summers (until we got AC about 2017). All of the first three tapes of the second...

Ooh, I found a new (to me) failure mode. I found another box of tapes in the house, and got set up to try to recover from them. I replaced the elastic band, reassembled the tape cartridge and then slapped that baby in the tape drive and started off with a retension, which seemed to go fine. Then...

I've been playing CF card bingo recently. I have a few machines I've been trying to swap CF cards between. One small revelation I encountered last night was that a 128MB CF card that I had installed from floppies on a Socket 7 motherboard (ASUS P55T2P4 v3.0) would boot fine in that machine, but...

It also helps to get both sides of the bands between the tape spools without putting tension on the bands. Someone mentioned using chopsticks, but I didn't have any chopsticks on my bench, but I did have a wirewrap tool. I've noticed that either of these bands (either the green plastibands or...

I've seen the pictures, but I have invented my own method. I get the tension band on the pinch pulley, loop it around the "fat" side pulley, then hold everything down with my left hand. I take the skinny-side pulley off its axle, put the tension band on the pulley, then stretch it straight in...

It took some practice. Some took more tries than others. The archive brand cartridges has some spools that seemed more apt for bands to slip off the sides. I had a total of 18 cartridges, two of them I left the green plastibands on that I had recently installed.

Bands arrived on Friday, tape dumps made with dd. With one of the tapes, having successfully recovered its data, I made some initial attempts to write data to it. So far, the attempts (from linux) have failed with inscrutable errors. The idea of writing is to try to eventually create sytos...

Bands allegedly arriving today.

Once the Misumi-sourced Mobilon bands arrive (they allegedly finally shipped today, but still no idea about delivery date as UPS tracking is being coy), and I have a plentiful supply and don't need to contemplate borrowing bands between tapes, I am considering doing some test writes with Sytos...

I had never heard of 010editor, but I have heard of GNU poke.

Just to follow up, after some cognitive assistance from @Chuck(G), I managed to piece together what Sytos Plus was trying to tell me, which I can paraphrase as: "there are multiple possible formats and we aren't going to try to detect which one it is, you have to choose from a list of two", so I...

I reviewed my notes from the time of the backup, September 1992, and there is nothing in them that would indicate I was using anything but SYTOS on the QIC drive in that period. A few weeks later, I'm talking about buying the first DDS drive.

That is the combo I have for 9-track. I don't actually have any data on 9-track tapes though. We used it for data transfer only to/from dinosaur collaborators. I also have a never tested front-loading 9-track drive alleged to have a SCSI-Pertec adapter.

I discovered from my notes that I was talking to this guy (https://obits.oregonlive.com/us/obituaries/oregon/name/jerry-vallereux-obituary?id=12803199) on July 27, 1992 about the laguna pertec card and a problem with their software locking up when hitting End of Tape. Not sure it's related at all.

Yeah, I noticed the high bits too, and was excited to try to see what it might be spelling with the high bit stripped. And then at offset 0x66, the high bit stops, mostly. There are several tapes from the same epoch and the "header" files all look similar. I can diff the the hexdumps and the...

I think I'm outing myself as impatient, but I found another tape to risk while I wait for the misumi bands. It was an Archive Model 560 (600 foot) cartridge that I'd had success with earlier, even without replacing the tension bands. I put a plastiband on it, gave it a retension under linux and...

I have inspected closely and see no shedding. The pins are spotless.

I checked the pivot, it seems the plastic case was not quite clicked all the way down. After removing the plastic case, I noticed that the door sprung closed as seemed normal and reattaching the plastic case and ensuring it was clicked all the way down, the door no longer stuck open. All fixed...

I'm curious if you ever made any progress on recovering files from dumps of sytos backups?

I lied. I didn't wait. I transferred the plastiband from my experimental/sacrificial cartridge to the first (of 7) of the SYTOS backups from 1992. But I just used dd to get a dump. Like I observed with the DDS tapes written with SYTOS, there was an initial short tapefile (a single block of 1024...