LTO1 Tape recovery Splicing and Re-spooling

[quasimodo]

Hello guys,

I have a LTO1 tape from a Network Admin friend of mine for recovery. It's not super critical data, but it would be nice for him to get it back and a good learning experience for me. It's beyond software recovery, so I am looking at re-spooling and possible splicing too. I understand the process in theory, but lack the physical experience and I am not sure what tools I need. Any pointers especially in regards to the re-spooling tools and process would be awesome.

Please PM me

Thanks

[quasimodo]

Anyone willing to share a few crumbs of knowledge on the subject?

[Daisy Woo]

http://www.actionfront.com/os_tape.aspx

A starting point. Looks like Action Front have used an old tape drive as a spooler. This one looks like it is configured to dry out wet tapes.

[quasimodo]

Daisy,

Thanks for the reply. I have seen this as well when I was browsing the web.
I was in hope that some one out there was selling a commercial product for re-spooling.

If I have to built it myself, does anyone have a suggstion for the design?

[Daisy Woo]

The thing is Quasimodo, that this sort of thing was done in the days when people would pay a lot of money for a recovery. This would probably have taken at least two tape drives and and engineer or contractor a week to construct, test and refine. Then another day or two to dry the tape and read it. Then the rig will probably go in a cupboard for years.

I think you wont find anything like this for sale anywhere, but if you get a couple of cheap tape drive from eBay, then a few empty tapes, you should be able to rig something up.

What you will need is some software to inch the tapes through, let me know if you have a requirement I'm sure I could come up with something to do this. It is already something I had been planning to add to some of our tape imaging/copying products.

Daisy

[kangaroo]

Splicing is difficult with LTO. Some other formats are OK with splicing if you understand how they work at a low level, but you run into the pre-recorded information on the LTO which stops cut and shut operations. To wind a tape all you need is two spools and some patience and a lot of care. By the time you have built a rig you could have re-spooled a tape manually. It tapes 2-4 hours to wind an LTO by hand, the variation is down to tea breaks and phone calls.
Software to "inch along a tape" is an interesting idea, I'm not sure which SCSI command would be used for this. Possibly mode select into unbuffered mode then issue 1 block skips would minimise movement, but after a pause the drive will kick into life and move quite a lot of tape if it needs to re-fill it buffers. Can't see how this would help anyhow. Good luck.

[quasimodo]

Thank you both very much for your replies.
Based on your recommendation I will try to stay away from Splicing the LTO tape.
I will attempt to manually re-spool the tape and hope for the best. In addition I will put some thought In to engineering a rig to automate the process for possible future needs. I belive there is a software product which would be able to handle this after splicing, but It is extremley overprices.
Well, I just bought a verly new car, maybe I can use it as down payment for the software

Daisy,

You mentioned that you have some tape imaging products. Do you have a website or some information that I can take a look at?

Thanks again to both of you for your assistance and ideas.