[COFF] further off topic w.r.t. Unix - NTBACKUP [was Re: Someone wants to use an exabyte

[Charles H Sauer]

[clearly not Unix related, so posting to COFF]

On 11/27/2019 1:31 PM, John Foust wrote:

> The tougher task was trying to find contemporary tools that could process the data stream from an old NTBACKUP, especially a stream with corruption from missing chunks, as I wasn't in the mood to try to rebuild an NT machine with SCSI to let NTBACKUP deal with the drive directly, and I think it would probably fail harder on direct drive errors.

If I recall correctly, the XP Pro* version of NTBACKUP is compatible 
with, and an improvement over, the NT4 version in dealing with tapes and 
will also deal with file images of tapes. I will probably remember a lot 
better soon, because I want to look for some files that I thought I had 
archived on disk but seem to have lost. If I have them, they're on DDS-2 
or DDS-3.

Again, IIRC, SCSI is not hard to deal with with XP. An old Dell, with 
Dell XP install CD, should be relatively easy to setup with various 
Adaptec cards. I don't know about other brands w.r.t. license keys.

I plan to use a Dell Dimension 8300 that I used to look at some Dell 
UNIX DDS-2 cartridges. It dual boots Fedora & XP, but I still need to 
verify that XP doesn't need anything more for the HP DAT drive I have, 
and dig out cartridges that might have what I want. My recollection is 
the NT4 required tape drive specific drivers but that XP does not.

Lastly, again IIRC, Microsoft removed and/or broke NTBACKUP when Vista 
came out.

CHS

*XP Home didn't have NTBACKUP, but the Pro binary works on Home.
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