Earlier today a former colleague retweeted this:
and strangely, I've been here before.
When I was managing the ANU's various ANDS funded data capture projects we made use of company in Perth that specialised in reading old tapes - in particular for the mining industry, but they would read anything - for a fee of course.
As part of the DC7A project, we used this company to read seismological data that was locked away on piles of DAT tapes that no one could read any more, due to no one on campus having suitable hardware.
As is the way in universities, a researcher in social sciences, who worked in PNG heard of this.
He'd recently found some old 9 track tapes in a colleague's garage, and he recognised them as likely to hold a copy of some data from the PNG government. More importantly he thought that it might be data that the PNG government had lost as a result of a hardware failure.
Details were sketchy, there were some paper labels that identified them as 9track ascii tapes, but that was about it.
Any way I talked to our data recovery company and they were happy to give it a go.
Fortunately, despite languishing in a Canberra garage, the tapes were readable and were in a straight forward comma delimited format, rather than some old proprietary compressed data format, or some strange format used by some now forgotten data manipulation software.
So the data was recoverable and could be returned to the PNG government.
Now I'm not blogging about this seven years after the event to show how good I am, but rather to show that old data can (with a bit of luck) be recovered.
But to simplify your task do the following:
and strangely, I've been here before.
When I was managing the ANU's various ANDS funded data capture projects we made use of company in Perth that specialised in reading old tapes - in particular for the mining industry, but they would read anything - for a fee of course.
As part of the DC7A project, we used this company to read seismological data that was locked away on piles of DAT tapes that no one could read any more, due to no one on campus having suitable hardware.
As is the way in universities, a researcher in social sciences, who worked in PNG heard of this.
He'd recently found some old 9 track tapes in a colleague's garage, and he recognised them as likely to hold a copy of some data from the PNG government. More importantly he thought that it might be data that the PNG government had lost as a result of a hardware failure.
Details were sketchy, there were some paper labels that identified them as 9track ascii tapes, but that was about it.
Any way I talked to our data recovery company and they were happy to give it a go.
Fortunately, despite languishing in a Canberra garage, the tapes were readable and were in a straight forward comma delimited format, rather than some old proprietary compressed data format, or some strange format used by some now forgotten data manipulation software.
So the data was recoverable and could be returned to the PNG government.
Now I'm not blogging about this seven years after the event to show how good I am, but rather to show that old data can (with a bit of luck) be recovered.
But to simplify your task do the following:
- try and find if there's anyone still left who remembers the days of tapes - hopefully they might be able to help interpret the (paper) labels stuck on the tapes.
- talk to the people who are going to read the tapes. Chances are the tape will be in a 9 track format and be ascii encoded, unless it came from somewhere that used IBM or Amdahl mainframes where it might be EBCDIC
- don't be put off by people mentioning dead manufacturers like Prime or Data General, 9 track was a fairly standard format
- When you finally get to read the data, remember that even though it's been recorded in a standard way it doesn't mean that the data isn't in some proprietary format - again if you can find someone who knew about the original data they might remember the name of the software package used
do some detective work, and chances are you might luck out, and don't be afraid to ask questions ...
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