WARNING: Clear QIC Tape Bands

[Chuck Guzis]

On 1/18/22 11:38, Zane Healy via cctalk wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Jan 18, 2022, at 10:09 AM, Jonathan Chapman via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>>
>>> My opinion is that if you're trying to use DC carts for archival
>> storage, you should have your (tape) head examined.
>>
>> Not archival storage, just day-to-day operation on old stuff, like Sun3/Sun4, AT&T UNIX PC, etc.
> 
> Can you do tape operations over TCP/IP to a machine with a better drive, or a VTL?  On VMS, the last tape backups I did on a physical box, were to a virtual tape drive on a SIMH/VAX system.

If this is a SCSI QIC drive, I'd suggest moving to DLT, 8mm or even DDS.
 None of these suffer from the "broken bad" problem.   SCSI tape drives
as a class, are pretty much interchangeable as there's an ANSI spec for
the command set.

If it's a QIC-02 interface, you might want to look into emulation using
an MCU.  QIC-02 interface is stupid simple and any moderately capable
MCU should be able to generate the required signals.  You can probably
fit the contents of every QIC tape that you own on a single SD card.

QIC-36 is going to be a bit more difficult, but there were (and maybe
still are) QIC-36-to-QIC-02 bridge boards around.

My .02 for whatever its depreciated value is worth.

--Chuck