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Pacific Northwest [Needed] Data Recovery from 17 Sony QD-600A Tapes

Covers: Oregon and Washington
segaloco

segaloco

Experienced Member
Joined
Apr 30, 2023
Messages
348
Is the price negotiable?
Yes
Closest Major City
Seattle
Hello, I recently closed an auction for 17 Sony QD-600A tapes consisting of images from at least one machine named Zeus at Bell Laboratories in the early '90s. For the curious, said auction is here: https://www.ebay.com/itm/267254963191

It looks like most are /home backups but there is at least one /usr backup in there. I'm hoping to find artifacts relating to the internal System V version used inside BTL, as at least through SVR2 BTL published an expanded version of the user's manuals incorporating a number of internal tools in use throughout AT&T but not released with the typical commercial version. Among other things this includes the development tools for the MAC-8 and 3B/WE32x00 family of processors.

Happy to pay shipping both ways as well as for your time and effort. I don't know what this sort of service runs for typically so name your price. Also happy to take suggestions for formal services, although I see an opportunity here to support someone doing this more small-time. Either way, thanks for any suggestions. Not posting a WTB yet but will also entertain suggestions of available QD-600A-compatible drives to seek out, especially if you've got a link to an auction or sale in hand.

Thank you!
 
oh... BTW

"I don't know what this sort of service runs for typically so name your price."

I'd be curious if there are any commercial services left any more that will try to do it, or what their rates are.

Sydex was the last one I knew of, and he really didn't want to do it.
 
Shot an email over to Bear. Helpful that he's in Seattle too, I can probably just go down with the tapes. Thanks Al, hopefully there's some cool stuff down in these tapes.
 
his reply on TUHS ( I'm pretty sure he's on here as well)
for people following along at home

Talk to Bear Striklin (typewritten.org) who has extensive RECENT experience recovering QIC tapes
Click to expand...

It’s true.

Nothing I’ve tried has been truly reliable in terms of dealing with the inevitable mechanical problems arising from age related decay of these carts. They are an absolute disaster, easily an order of magnitude or two worse than TK50 ever was. Honestly I’d sooner face the task of recovering a stack of 100 TK50 carts than face another 5 DC600 QICs.

That said:

I have recently worked out a process that looks promising. But I’ve also had this experience with DC600 more than a handful of times, and each time, in the fullness of time, it turned out I had just gotten lucky in some specific regard.

It’s worth noting that sometimes, carts have survived into their senescence without succumbing to the worst of the mechanical troubles. Those tapes are easy, one pass, get it done, move on with life. When that _hasn’t_ happened, the process is utter hell. I can tell in about twenty seconds by visual inspection which category a tape is likely to fall into. Some brands are better than others, but this is still no guarantee.

If it turns out this new process is actually reliable (and is not just revealed to be another form of roll-the-dice) I will share it. It’s better for everyone if I’m not the only person doing this work. It’s nowhere near a science, but art can still be practiced and passed on.

I am currently sitting on a backlog of more than a thousand carts, both mine and others’, with no viable path to clearing it within the next year. So I am not taking on any more of this sort of work, for the moment. It’s not impossible I could start taking work again, but I can’t promise when that might be.


ok
bear.
 
@EdoNork The UNIX Heritage Society: https://www.tuhs.org/

This is a fantastic resource spearheaded by Warren Toomey and supported by numerous other folks from UNIX history and beyond. Among other things, the project includes a source code repository of preserved historic UNIX versions, an archive of communciations, documents, distribution tapes, and so on, and a lively mailing list that, while sometimes hard to keep on topic (guilty as charged) serves as a gathering place for both folks with lots of stories to tell and folks with open ears and minds looking to support ongoing UNIX preservation efforts.
 
@segaloco since you're local, here's what I can offer. I can meet you somewhere and make a quick inspection of your tapes. If, in my opinion, they look like they are likely to be survivors, I will read them for you, since the effort will be low and I could reasonably get it done within a couple weeks. You have my email address, please reply there to give me an idea about your thoughts around schedule and location.
 
Uh. It's worth mentioning there's another possibility here. Since we don't know what host they were written on, we cannot assume the data format is standard QIC. The 3B2 (non-SCSI) QIC drive, for example, does not use a standard data format, and while I could theoretically read this format, I am not able to commit to a non-standards-compliant QIC project right now. Unfortunately we won't be able to tell until we try to read them. In any case the first thing is to get a sense of their mechanical condition.
 
All this knowledge will be lost. I'm refering to the "data saving crafters".
Time to pass all that knowledge to others. But I suppose it's not easy and very time consuming.
 
Just a follow up but the tapes I received all have snapped belts. Still plan on getting them to bear sometime in the coming months hopefully just to see how much other damage is involved.
 
EdoNork said:
All this knowledge will be lost. I'm refering to the "data saving crafters".
Time to pass all that knowledge to others. But I suppose it's not easy and very time consuming.
Click to expand...

It is tedious because people including Chuck and myself have been repeating ourselves in forums for decades
Remember "Frequently Asked Questions" ? Thanks to AI enshitification good luck finding facts on the Interwebs.
If someone can't (mumble) and find a Ewe Toob video, the knowledge doesn't exist.

In the twenty years I have been doing this at CHM, I have never had anyone approach me to be an
apprentice.
 
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