Data recovery... will it work?

Hi

Quick background of the problem:

After a long period (10 yrs) of storage the scsi ribbon cable on my A3000 developed a very small fault that was almost undetectable but ultimately led to the complete loss of all files over approximately 20kb in size!, in the ensuing chaos an old 5 1/4 hd and a tape drive that chewed one my backup tapes ended up in the skip.

fast forward>>

All hardware issues with the Amiga now sorted and recently bought a replacement Archive 2150s tape drive to access my last os 3.1 backup, BUT....... the tape fails (corrupt) after 17 of 133 meg or say half way through DEVS/Printers

So my question is...Is it worth letting one of those "Data Recovery Service" companies have a go at it, they claim to have high success rates with any format (obviously they don't actually mention AmigaDos).

[thomas]

Whether it is worth is your decision actually. I imagine that it'll become rather expensive.

I doubt that there is anything AmigaDOS-related on that tape. It's rather a long stream of bytes that is organised somehow. Probably some kind of custom archive format introduced by the backup software you used. If you are lucky it is compatible to tar or some other popular archiving software. But I doubt that.

Talking about Devs/Printers; it is my personal opinion that the boot partition is the least important part to backup (and restore). A boot partition can easily be restored by installing the OS again. Much more important are data partitions which hold the result of creative work (paintings, music modules, source codes, saved games etc.)

I think you should contact the recovery company and ask them about their conditions. Perhaps they do an analysis for free.

Software is Quarterback, floppy backup disk are non AmigaDos format but it don't know about the tape backups (i hope not).

[mark_k]

Did you retension the tape before trying to read it? Did you test out the new tape drive before attempting to read the old tape (by successfully reading and writing to a new/blank tape)? Do you remember which software you used to write to the tape originally?

Yeah the software was Quaterback, re-tensioned the tape but no spare tapes to carry out a test!

I can skip some of the read errors and get a few more meg off the tape but it eventually stops completely, i only want a few old programs and SID2 + scripts and ill be happy!

[mark_k]

I'd recommend you get hold of a new (old stock) blank tape and a cleaning cartridge for your tape drive. Make sure the tape drive is working properly before risking your backup tape in it again.

I noticed a seller on eBay UK has a 5-pack of NOS QIC-150 tapes for £9.95 or best offer.

Thanks, well spotted, purchased!....... usually QIC tapes and drives can only be found in the USA at mega high prices!!!

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Just had a message from the UK ebay'er selling QIC tapes, he has "quite a few more" if anyone's interested.

[mark_k]

I'd be interested to hear how you get on. And also if you notice any cheap QIC cleaning cartridges please let me know.

Assuming your tape drive is working fine (e.g. fill a new tape with data, check it reads back without errors)...

Rather than use Quarterback to attempt to restore from your backup tape directly, I would try to dump as much data off the tape as possible. You could probably use the Amiga for that (via one of the tape handlers on Aminet), but my preference would be to connect the drive to a Linux PC. I'd use dd or a similar program to grab as much of each file as possible. Supposing block 123456 is unreadable, seek to block 123457 and try reading from there. You could rebuild the "good bits" files into a large image file, maybe replacing unreadable blocks with some distinctive data.

Then you could try using Quarterback to restore from your salvaged image file. If that doesn't work you could always use a hex editor to extract individual files from the image (assuming you didn't create the tape using data compression).