17 Jun
2014
17 Jun
'14
8:48 a.m.
On 06/17/2014 07:18 AM, Keith Monahan wrote:
It turns out two tapes "gave up the ghost"
as I was trying to read them.
Both made a horrible noise, and one of the tapes is clearly now damaged.
This isn't going to save the two damaged tapes, but when you get that
telltale squeal, the procedure is to "bake" any other tapes at between
130-140F for several hours.
Google "sticky shed" WRT audio tapes, for example. Same goes for
floppies. I have a DIY "oven" with about a cubic foot of space inside
with a slow-speed fan and a PID controller operating a 75V incandescent
as a heater. It holds the temperature to better than +/- 2F. It works
pretty well.
It's becoming increasingly necessary to handle floppies this way also.
I was successfully able to read a full tape last
night, but I'm still
stuck with the problem of how to extract the files from the image. I
believe that the resulting tape image would be a .qic file, so maybe if
i can find something that reads those vs wanting to read via an attached
device.
There were many backup file formats, so I can't really help you there.
I pretty much do recovery from scratch and roll my own decoding routines.
Good luck.
--Chuck