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Identify backup progam used with tapes

Can't tell you offhand, but I think that I look only for certain types of blocks and ignore anything else. May have some recovery logic, so that a bad block doesn't upset things. I had a bunch of tapes that were either incomplete or with errors and I wrote this to handle them. My notes say early 2021, so it's recent--I think one of the tapes in question was part of an LTO-2 multi-volume set, so there was no way that stock restore tools was going to work on an isolated volume.

The fact that I can't recall the details is probably a sign that I need to get out of this business. :)
 
All I know is the program I tried started to show stuff and with debug on I could see various things looked good. Then it would display "next block size" of a huge number (maybe a 32 bit number). I knew this was wrong so it's either reading something wrong or noise or who knows. I tried figuring it out but never got very far.
Now since yours worked I really have no need to look except like I said for my curiosity.
 
Note that mtfget does have a (conditional compilation) debug display, but I doubt that it will tell you what's going on with your tapes. At any rate, I'm glad that it worked.
 
Here are snips of the raw dumps from linux. Each tape dropped a 512 byte 0.bin and then the 1.bin was the full tape. I did a head on 1.bin because otherwise the size would be silly but here's what I'm dealing with.
 

Attachments

  • rawtape.zip
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No, I mean 65K or so right from the start of the tape. Don't worry about filler, my viewer elides that. Unless your 1.bin.head starts right after 0.bin, then I have what I need. Please advise.
 
Thank you Chuck - appreciate the help and time. I can send a full file as well. My friend said that some of the ZIP files (we can actually extract the dumps to files, but they're garbled) are readable because I guess the tape software couldn't compress them any further - I have to check on that.
 
I'm attaching one of the smaller tape dumps that we parsed into files; when unzipped, you realize that the ZIP files can be unzipped successfully. I'll attach the companion full RAW too. It's unfortunately too big to paste here.

I'll DM you the link and the password. The DM isn't to obfuscate the conversation. I'll share with anyone else who is interested.
 
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