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Was cleaning out the server room (which apparently has NEVER been done, found a set of auto cad software on 5 1/4 floppies while I was in there…) we have a pile of old tape backups and my boss wants me to go through them and pull anything we potentially need to save in case of a lawsuit or something off them and save it on a external HD. Digging through the piles of random stuff in the server room I found the Dell Powervault LTO-2-024 and the cables that go with it, and bought a scsi card, other than finding drivers for the thing is there anything else I’ll need to get this to work? I’ve never had to play with a tape drive before.

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You will need to know what software wrote to the tapes.

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If it was written to with NT Backup, then NT Backup will be able to read the tapes. If it was Backup Exec, then Backup Exec would be able to read the tapes.

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Awesome thanks.

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Chris. Just be careful. Some older NT Backup writes cannot be read by the newer versions. If you can get a read out from properties as to what format they were written in, then see if there is an old server that they originally belonged to. It will save a lot of headaches. Look for a tape head cleaner in the tape pile. That will be essential

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Found 2 cleaner tapes in the pile of old stuff, I’m pretty sure that the servers these back ups came out of got thrown out/ebay’d by my boss when he 1st took over as none of the current hardware has the correct connectors for the cables the drives use.

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Will these even be something that I’d be able to pull individual files off to selectively archive like old emails/sales reports or would they just be like a system restore point? The boss seems to think they were created using Backup Exec.

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Chris,

It would really depend on what is found on the tapes. What was backed up and how… if they are holding GRT backups of exchange then you shouldnt have issue with pulling off individual emails. Even if it wasnt GRT there are still options like restoring to RSG/RDB. You should first inventory and catalog the tapes and see what exactly it is that they have on them.

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Apparently the connector isn’t what I thought it was can anyone ID this for me?

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