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I realize that similar questions have been posed before, but none really quite like this one, so I’m hoping someone can give me some guidance:

A company that I do work with has uncovered a trove of LTO-2, LTO-3 and LTO-4 tapes. They’re at least a several years old, and the owner knows that the tapes were used regularly for their backups until they switched to a combination of external hard drives and cloud backups a few years ago. We do not know what is on them or if there is a special format that would be used.

The nature of the backups was being done by a partner in the company who left some time ago, and we recently found out he died last year. (He had been suffering kidney failure for a long time.) There’s no hardware either.

But we’d really love to know what is on them, because there are definitely gaps in what the company has for archived data, including some web content they had in the early 2000’s. We think these tapes might have a treasure trove of otherwise lost data.

The problem is the hardware was thrown away some time ago. Today, the company has Windows 10 computers. I’ve looked, but I can’t find any explicit information on whether older LTO drives would have driver support in Windows 10. Of course, we could also setup an XP machine for data recovery (If absolutely necessary) or a linux machine. Also, perfectly willing to spend a few bucks on an interface card, like an external SCSI or SAS card or something like that.

The owner has asked me to make this a project, and I’m genuinely interested in doing this for him.

I see plenty of drives on eBay for very reasonable prices. He wants to keep this cheap (under a few hundred dollars). And again, it’s not an issue of being critical to recover what is on those. We just think it could be something very interesting.

So my question boils down to whether we can get one of those older (say 2000’s) drives to work out on a modern system.

I apologize, that I have zero experience with tape drives of this era. What I’ve read is that they can use different software encoding and compression methods.

Thanks in advance.

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Bearer of bad news time:

The hardware isn’t the issue, nor is even setting up an old system with that hardware. The issue is that you need to know what software was used to create them. Software from one vendor will usually not be able to read the backups that were created from another vendor. Backup Exec was very popular with LTO drives but it’s not the only solution out there. I’m not sure there’s really any good way to determine what was used to create them other than hoping someone there might have known.

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@pfarrell ​ hit the nail on the head - the software used to create the backups on the tape cartridges is critical to know. Without that knowledge, you will probably need to ship the cartridges to a data recovery service for extracting the data. @sam-kroll-ontrack ​ Ontrack Data Recovery would be my first point of contact for this.

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I can try going through the associated paperwork and a lot of the old stuff we have in storage. It may just say.

Are there so many such programs that you could not just try them until you found one that would read it?

Pardon my ignorance. I actually know quite a lot about IT and security… just not about the nitty gritty of tape hardware.

I didn’t realize it was so software dependent but that causes me other concerns. Since some of this stuff is for truely long term storage, what happens if the software gets abandoned or does not support new operating systems? We’d be back to trying to set up an old system to host software nobody supports anymore, I suppose.

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Therein lies the problem with long term storage. You need to be sure you maintain systems that can restore it. That means the software and the hardware. Usually newer versions of software can read tapes backed up by older versions, but if say your stuff was backed up by Backup Exec, it’s not likely that it’s going to be recoverable by Bacula.

If the vendor goes out of business then you would have to keep the last version you owned. There’s also the possibility you would have to transition it to new media. Restore the system, back it up again with a new product.

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As long as you have a working tape drive and some server/workstation with the original backup software you’ll be able to get your data back. You might want to contact professional services for that. Backuping and using in production old hardware is a bad idea really, in your case - mostly due small capacity of the ancient tape drives.

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Also, with LTO hardware, the drive can only read a tape up to 2 versions prior that what the drive is. So an LTO4 drive can read tapes back to LTO2 .

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You will need backup software that supports the device you choose. Take a look at the Commvault comptability matrix here: Commvault Support Services - Compatibility Matrices

A single license of Complete Backup & Rcovery will cover your needs, download a free trial here: Request Demo | Commvault

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With regards to contacting a recovery company: In case, I did not explain it, this is a side project that is not something anyone wants to spend a lot of money on. The company is not truly “missing” any data. The thought is that there could be something on the tapes we’re not aware of, because they’re close to 20 years old. What could it be? We don’t know. Maybe fun pictures from the 2006 Christmas party? Maybe some major accounts receivable data from 1999? Maybe someone’s last will and testament? There could very well be something worth money, like unclaimed assets or something. Most likely not, but it’s possible.

Most likely, it’s a lot of old business records, e-mails, reports and so on. We’re just not sure. But there is reason to be curious that there is something on them, and it could turn out to be worthwhile.

The problem is we have the tapes, we know they were used. We have vague human recollections of what was on them. We can’t find any good records.

We know that relatively comprehensive backups were done at least weekly and that they stopped using tapes altogether about ten years ago. The man who would be most responsible for the system has died. There are others who might have known. We’re not sure where they all are now. Those still around don’t seem to recall very well exactly how it worked. One person, who was working there at the time, says he recalls that there is more than one version of the software or hardware, because he thinks at some point they changed their backup system and got a new one, which was not compatible with the old one. He, however, is not certain of this.

There is nothing critical missing, so if the tapes can’t be read for less than a couple thousand dollars, they won’t be read.I’m willing to do this on my own time, simply because I’m interested in it.