Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Locked thread
Bedevere
Jun 24, 2005
Grimey Drawer
Quick version: I need advise on a shelf for storing a bunch of 10.5" reel to reel backup tapes.

Long version: I recently had to recall a bunch of tapes from an offsite storage we were no longer doing business with. I was asked to house them locally which generally I can do no problem. I expected some old LTOs or maybe even the older 3590 tapes. What I got was nearly three hundred 10.5 inch reels (3M Black Watch No. 703 Extra Length 6250 CPI all dated in the early 90s). I have no place for these things and they don't quite fit in a standard filing cabinet. I have left them in the boxes they were shipped in for six months but I need to get them off the floor of the data canter and on a shelf somewhere. These things don't shelf so easy and no one seems to sell those old cabinets for these things.

Any ideas? I get they may not even be readable they are so old, but I need to at least make some effort on this. I did call a data conversion place to price having these put on a different format. I thought they accidentally added too many zeros. I can't imagine the look on managements face when I try to sell that expense.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

BangersInMyKnickers
Nov 3, 2004

I have a thing for courageous dongles

Does anyone even have the equipment to read these things back? Back of the hand math says you have 60gb of data there tops, I'd have an intern/grunt/whatever dump them to disk images and upload it to S3, file share, or something. Tapes degrade over time and odds are you probably are going to have lots of read errors on those things. If they actually have some kind of value or utility then getting it on to a more stable medium should be a priority otherwise everyone is just lying to themselves.

Bedevere
Jun 24, 2005
Grimey Drawer
They do have them, but now they want your first born to use it.

I remember these have little square tabs on the outer ring for hanging them on pegs....

Edit: 100% agree on the validity of the medium. I can't imagine they read properly.

BangersInMyKnickers
Nov 3, 2004

I have a thing for courageous dongles

Yeah, hanging rack was going to be my next suggestion if you're stuck with them. Were these things stored in a climate controlled space for their entire life? The environmental spec for these things is fairly tight on humidity/temp control and they degrade fast outside of it. Maybe try running a test read against a sampling of them and see what the error rate is. If you can prove they are garbage then you might be able to get away with wiping and disposing of them.

Ivan Yurkinov
Jan 13, 2010
Unspool all the tape off of the reels into someone's cube and then take a pic of the giant tape blob and post it here

thirding there is no usable data on those tapes at this point

Aunt Beth
Feb 24, 2006

Baby, you're ready!
Grimey Drawer
Cube wall art is the only reason reel to reel data tapes should still exist.

atomicthumbs
Dec 26, 2010


We're in the business of extending man's senses.

Aunt Beth posted:

Cube wall art is the only reason reel to reel data tapes should still exist.



someone hasn't visited the Living Computer Museum

spog
Aug 7, 2004

It's your own bloody fault.
I am curious as the why you would care about data that old that hasn't already been migrated to a more modern medium. If it were of any use, surely it would be sitting on a tiny folder on a network somewhere.

It's not the moon-landing or a lost Doctor Who, is it?

atomicthumbs
Dec 26, 2010


We're in the business of extending man's senses.

spog posted:

I am curious as the why you would care about data that old that hasn't already been migrated to a more modern medium. If it were of any use, surely it would be sitting on a tiny folder on a network somewhere.

It's not the moon-landing or a lost Doctor Who, is it?

rules and regulations

spog
Aug 7, 2004

It's your own bloody fault.

atomicthumbs posted:

rules and regulations

I thought that the legal requirements in the USA was only 6 years

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

BangersInMyKnickers
Nov 3, 2004

I have a thing for courageous dongles

Rules is whatever the person cutting your check say they are.

  • Locked thread