Martin Hepworth wrote:
dd the entire tape to disk, so you've got the binary to play with^W^W inspect.
Exactly what I was thinking. Next, I'd probably use "split" to break it down into manageable chunks and use "strings" and "od" commands such as "od -c" and hex editors to try to make some sense of the junk. With luck, you might find some pattern, like the beginning/end of individual backups or files that you could use "csplit" to break the backup into more logical chunks. With even more luck, you might figure out what compression algorithm was used, for example "gzip" compressed data almost always begins with the same character string, but I forget what it is, then you might be able to decompress the chunks or something if it isn't totally proprietary.
--jonathan
