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Identify backup progam used with tapes

So you need an older PC to run straight DOS or on older version of Windows that can run straight DOS. Guessing you don't have one. Could you run DOSBOX or a Virtual Machine to run an older version of WIndows or DOS? I have to say I have never heard of that one.
 
I have mucked about with a few virtual tape drive systems that emulate a tape drive and the "tape" is a file.
All done with drivers, so may be possible to find/use something like that on a dd image. Some used a proprietory layout, so raw files wouldn't work with those.

One other way might be to simply dd it back to a known good tape drive and tape then try to read that.
Tapes and drives are still way down the order in my rather long vintage computing queue.
 
That's what I tried to do for mine. Found a program called mcptap that claimed it could read Backup Exec tapes. It would start to read the DD file but eventually fail with a "pointer" that was huge. So I was never able to get the files off the tape. Another program I found claimed to be able to convert a Backup Exec file to TAR format. That didn't work either. I found a few others and have the source, but Backup Exec format is really weird. I do not know if anything changed in later versions but the version I had used was several iterations beyond the only format documents I could find.
 
I vaguely remember running into a problem like this. It seems that there were two flavors of the backup utility (I don't recall which one it was; could have been Backup Exec). One for single-user systems and a slightly different one for servers. The server one could read the single-use tapes, but not vice-versa.

I'd have to dig pretty deep in my logs to figure out how I discovered this.
 
Well, I have never run any server software at home. I don't remember which version of Windows I had but the tapes are from late 98. I know I used a version of Backup Exec as the dumps of the tape show that right at the front. What's weird is that the tool runs for awhile and then gets lost and displays a really large value for what I assume should be a "pointer" to something (I use the term pointer loosely here). So I don't know if the tape had a bit of corruption or not. Or maybe the backup itself wrote an invalid value.
 
Yes, Trantor was bought by Adaptec I think! I have TapeMate II v1.1 and v1.2. Not v1.3 - I'll grab that - but using DOSBOX or other virtualizer doesn't work with the tapes. I am not sure how to take the file dump and point DOS software at it.
 
Also - a friend who is helping me try to rescue this data says he thinks it was a program called TXPLUS that was used for some of these tapes. Does anyone have a copy of that or a Linux program to read dumps?
 
For more detail - the tape drive in question (the original one) is an Interpreter TapeXchange external tape drive, which was a metal case with a nifty handle. Apparently they were popular. The power supply on the external housing was long dead, so I yanked the drive out - it was a Sankyo CP150SE. This drive also had some time-related issues and wasn't really able to read the tapes (it despooled one of them). So my friend was able to yank the data using another drive attached to a Linux host. In his investigation he saw the TXPLUS markings -- some sleuthing on the Internet shows that TXPLUS indeed was a software that came with this package. So despite the person sending me the drive, tapes, and TapeMate II, it may not be TapeMate unless TapeMate and TXPLUS are the same compression format.
 
I’ll get one, sure. In the meantime I may be using the term incorrectly. The files are in some proprietary format but files that were already compressed are coming out okay like ZIP and ARC files. That’s why finding TXPLUS would be so critical
 
tradde said:
Well, I have never run any server software at home. I don't remember which version of Windows I had but the tapes are from late 98. I know I used a version of Backup Exec as the dumps of the tape show that right at the front. What's weird is that the tool runs for awhile and then gets lost and displays a really large value for what I assume should be a "pointer" to something (I use the term pointer loosely here). So I don't know if the tape had a bit of corruption or not. Or maybe the backup itself wrote an invalid value.
Click to expand...
I have a copy of "Seagate Backup Exec 2.0i (STE) for Windows 95/98/NT" dated March of 1998. It came with a 8GB Travan tape drive, but I have used it with DAT drives no problem. The disc also has "Seagate Backup Exec 5.6" for Windows 3.1x from 1997 and "Seagate Backup 5.1.6" for DOS from 1997 as well. As an added bonus, there are some drivers for period Travan tape drives for the NTBackup program that came with NT 4.0.
 
Update - my friend found TXPLUS, but it only works with the original drive which has a parallel port enclosure. I don’t have the drive enclosure anymore because it was dead - what do folks do to try to figure out how these tape software products work to decode a dump of the tape on Linux?
 
According to my dumps this was Windows NT Backup Exec 1.0 ver 3.41. I had it running on some version of Windows not NT.
 
I had tried some other various tools referred to as MTF and MTFTAR. I will have to try yours to see what happens. Would be great if it works. Thanks.
 
Holy cow, Batman. That worked. Thanks Chuck. I will now go and look at my 3 other tapes. Nothing of any importance appeared to be on the one I had tried. Don't know what is different between your MTFGET and the others I tried. I'll have to see if I can figure that out just for my own curiosity.
 
Here is the TXPLUS v5.19 software from Interpreter Tape Backup Systems that shipped with their TapeXchange product, which was a SCSI tape drive inside a metal enclosure with a handle, that was meant to connect to the parallel port. We have the data off the tapes from Linux, but we can't figure out their compression/format/whatever, so the data is garbled. TXPLUS only works with tape drives connected to the parallel port, not to any other board or a SCSI adapter. What is the best way to reverse engineer this?
 

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