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General discussion

Tape Drives

by clifwhite Mar 6, 2006 5:30AM PST

I have an old SCSI LaCie Tape Drive that reads Travan TR4 tapes (8 GB compressed, 4 GB uncompressed) that has been hooked up to an old mac. It recently died. The issue I have is that I have 31 tapes (approx. 5 yrs. worth of old jobs) worth of information that I do occasionally need to access and pull files. I also have G4 and G5 machines outfitted with Tiger and USB and firewire.

I have been searching and searching hoping to find a tape drive that will a) still read the old TR4 tapes and b) that might be able to hook up to the new machines. I have tried a Seagate/Certance TapeStor drive but it kept giving me the message "content unrecognized" in Retrospect. I finally got an answer from a tech person at Quantum that said I needed to use the original software. Well, the original Retrospect software the tapes were cataloged/created under was version 4.x which is an OS 9 application which I can't run on the new machines.

Has anyone had any similar problems with tape drives or know of any I can purchase that are USB and read the old TR4 tapes? Or do I just try to find an old SCSI drive on eBay for the old machine? I just want to find some way to pull the files off so I can re-archive them under my new (non-tape) system.

Thanks in advance for any responses... I am totally lost at where to find the answers for this dilemma.

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How about this:

by mrmacfixit Forum moderator Mar 6, 2006 7:15AM PST

Find a PCI SCSI card that will work under OS 9 and install it into the G4
Boot the G4 into OS 9, load the original software onto the G4 and recover ALL your data from the Tapes.
Large FW drives would also be handy to store this stuff until you can back them up again using OS X, Retrospect and a DVD or three.

A review of three tape drives, one of which uses Travan tape can be found here.
Hope the above, and below, help.

http://www.macworld.com/2001/02/bc/28reviewsfirewiretd/

P

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