Drive inventory

On Wed, 13 Feb 2002, Zane H. Healy wrote: Here's what I've come up with. There are currently 5 DAT formats (DDS, DDS-1, DDS-2, DDS-3, and DDS-4) and all are backward compatible. According to this site: http://www.ls.eso.org/lasilla/Telescopes/2p2T/E2p2M/WFI/tapes/TapeType.html DDS-2 and DDS-3 use physically different media. I don't know how this figures if the standards are all supposed to be backward compatible. Here's a great page on backup tape in general: http://www.pctechguide.com/15tape.htm Here's a troubling statement I found on this webpage: "One of the drawbacks with QIC is incompatibility. The format has suffered 120 currently - and not all QIC drives are compatible with all standards." Oy. Looks like I'll have to hang on to every single different tape drive I find to make sure I can recover any QIC formats that get thrown at me. At least until I find a definitive reference that tells me what drives can read what formats. Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org * Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *