I have customer 3490 tapes from the 90's in my storage vault. (I also
have good 3490 drives.)
We told the customer that we do not know if the tapes were even readable
when we got them 8 years ago. The told us:
"We don't care. As long as we can tell the auditors that we have the
tapes, we are good to go. If there is ever a need to read the tapes, we
will fight the problems reading the data off the tape at that time. If a
lawyer wants data, we will then do a 'good faith' attempt to read it,
but not until then."
Tony Thigpen
Radoslaw Skorupka wrote on 6/8/21 4:08 PM:
Rule of thumb: you don't need old tapes, you may need old data.
In my former life I had 20 years old data, but the tapes were approx.
2-3 years old (max.). And always replicated, always in two locations.
For old media (tapes, optical, hdd's, whatever) the earlier you start
reading them the better chances you have.
--
Radoslaw Skorupka
Lodz, Poland
W dniu 08.06.2021 o 15:18, Carl Swanson pisze:
This was a fun trip down memory lane, I remember the Overland
device. And if memory servers me correctly you had to load the tape
through the mechanism manually, there was at least the ne I tried in
the early 90's no autoloader. Why could this be important is because
the most likely error these types of tapes will see is edge damage
making the not readable. And every time a human hand touches, they the
chances go up. Last Time I spoke with anyone about 3420 tapes was back
around 2010 and they had a number of tapes that for any reason "Could
Not be Scratched". Their solution was to hand the tapes to the person
making that statement and saying they will not be scratched because
they are in your possession. I thought it was a great solution to the
issue. The likelihood of reading these tapes in my opinion is very
low, they have passed their shelf life.
Carl Swanson
Mobile:215.688.1459
Email: [email protected]
-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On
Behalf Of Paul Gilmartin
Sent: Sunday, June 6, 2021 12:21 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [External] Re: access to 9-track reel tape drive
On Sun, 6 Jun 2021 05:54:17 +0000, Seymour J Metz wrote:
Presumably he's saying that nobody in his right mind would simply
copy the data on the tape to a byte stream, and that the most obvious
way to archive the tape is to convert it to AWSTAPE format. Once it's
in AWSTAPE format, then it's simple to read it under Hercules,
assuming that the labels and records follow OS/360 conventions.
Amen. Joe Monk's and Radoslaw's comments appear well-informed.
And with 9-track I believe there's no need to deal with the
abomination of even parity. ( knew an old CDC OS that relied on the
difference to discern filetypes, even replicating the behavior in DASD
files.)
It's a pity there's no facility to process AWSTAPE directly with no
need for a step to convert to virtual or real 3480. Subsystem? ISV?
Or to generate AWSTAPE on Linux, MacOS, or Windows.
Does a dump of the first block say "VOL1"?
If the OP believes the tapes contain useful data he probably knows
which utility can process the restored images.
-- gil
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