Other Media Recovery

[D_R]

Hey Guys,

I think that most of "us" is recovering HDDs/SSD and some Flash Media like USB Sticks, SD- or CF-Cards. I was wondering, if you (still) have equipment to read / recover Floppy- / ZIP- / JAZ- Diskettes, CD / DVD / BD Disks, LTO / DAT Bands or other media, that was used some years ago.

Why I'm asking? On my table, currently I have a box with punch cards for DR.

[data-medics]

The oldest media I'll touch is 3.5" floppies, optical media, and zip drives. I don't really get into the tape backup stuff, or the really old stuff. It's near impossible these days to find a working computer old enough to interface with them.

Good luck finding something to read those punch cards. You'd probably have to do it manually by eye these days.

[fzabkar]

Hey Guys,

I think that most of "us" is recovering HDDs/SSD and some Flash Media like USB Sticks, SD- or CF-Cards. I was wondering, if you (still) have equipment to read / recover Floppy- / ZIP- / JAZ- Diskettes, CD / DVD / BD Disks, LTO / DAT Bands or other media, that was used some years ago.

Why I'm asking? On my table, currently I have a box with punch cards for DR.

I think I still have a Remex paper tape reader in the garage. I also have a Cipher 900X reel-to-reel MTU.

[D_R]

Good luck finding something to read those punch cards. You'd probably have to do it manually by eye these days.

Actually it was quite simple. I use a chroma key background and a good light setting to read the cards optically. I wrote a simple OpenCV program, that is looking for the green dots on an image taken by a webcam. Works very well. The only problem is that someone has to flip the cards.

But this is one of the moments, I wish I had a 6-axis robot arm. It could automate the job at all. But on the other hand I have another machine with two hands and five fingers on each hand called my apprentice.