RESEARCH NEEDED: DAT and LTO

Bandit LOAF

Bandit LOAF

Long Live the Confederation!
This is a 'worst' (best?) case scenario assignment. Jeff Morris has been doing some research on the project and forwarded me this quote from an xOriginite familiar with their backup systems:

Nah, that was before these guys... The 8mm type tapes were in the early 90's timeframe, we switched to some DAT and all LTO by the 1995/97 timeframe. I'd say Dave Reeves or Sean Kelly… I haven't talked to either of them in years. I remember having to do a restore from these backups in '96 and it was a nightmare… The backups are likely novell netware backups of some type and they used a proprietary exabyte tape drive with specific software. This is a wild guess, but, it might have been named paladin or paradym or some derivative of those two software names… You might be able to find one of these tape drives, hook it to a novell netware server, and by default since the software is so old, it may detect the tape image. If I remember correctly, these backups contained some old artwork from one of the earlier games, I think the reason I used it was to pull some artwork off that had the potential to be used in crusader…

I did the site survey and I didn't come across any DAT or LCO tapes - but there might be some hidden in a box corner. Can someone pull up what kind of hardware these tapes would require, so that we can search for it at a moment's notice if the issue arises?

(As far as I could tell, the mid- and late- 90s backups were all on CD-Rs.)
 
I have DAT units shelved at job, so I guess I could borrow one and ship it to you. I have an old LTO unit that was attached to a Sun server, not sure if it could be of some use, but I could lend this one too.

As for restoring the backups, I think the most important thing is to get a hold on someone who could tell which backup software was used. If that software has a Windows version, I am pretty sure it could restore the files, too.
 
Cool - that would be most welcome. What kind of interface do they use?

Of the two things, the DAT seems a lot more likely. It's possible that what I thought was a stack of camcorder tapes was actually a box of DATs...
 
The problem with the latter 2 links is that this is a time-sensitive mission, probably too sensitive to rely on 3rd party data recovery companies. As I understand it, the Mythic team (which probably won't include me, the timing sucks) only has 5 days of access to the tapes and such before they go into archival storage at EA.
 
The hardware is still commonly accessible today and still sold on the market,
current DAT5 and LTO2 drive systems can read their respective predecessors tapes.

the most common interface would be 68-pins scsi from a simple host adapter, and from the era it would be likely be DAT1 or DAT2.

As for the software, my bet would be on brightstore arcserve, and the 90-day free trial is fully functional and can recover from all previous versions, including the novell-based versions.
 
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