Anyone know anything about QIC tape drives?

[BeTheChange]

My father in law wrote a book in 87, it's a political resource guide. Basically has every organization, video, tape, resource of that time broken down topically. We are trying to revive it, clear out the 90% of out of date date and add new stuff. It would help me immensely not to have to type 1300 pages of information up. Atleast if I could get it in some type of format, I can hopefully convert it.

Im trying to figure out how to go about getting this data. I dont have a drive that reads 600A data cartidges.. so I know Ill need to get the data recovered. What I cant concieve of is what type of data could be on there. Since its the book, its supposedly in some type of database format. Anyone have any ideas about any of this?

Give me a SQL db and Im golden.. anything before 1996, Im pretty clueless about.

Thanks in advance.

[disgruntled_goat]

1. hurm

i used to run into these drives back in 1999...Veterinarians were still using them as legacy backup units and we serviced these drives.

you'd want to at least know what OS (Microsoft? some form of UNIX? mac?) was used back in the day to write the tape originally...

plus, maybe you could find a veterinary computer company such as vetconnect or idexx-informatics to hip you to a source of these drives.

prolly a few on ebay from time to time as well.

my barely $0.02
d_g


*edited for clarity

[BeTheChange]

2. Thanks :)

The problem is that FIL isnt so good with technology.. Unix seems to ring a bell with him.. but who knows.

Ive found drives on ebay that would read them, but they are a few hundred bucks..and I figure if Im gonna have to pay for data conversion anyway, why pay for a drive.. ya know..

Maybe Ill make a stab at the calling the publishing company and asking them just what the deal is. :)

Otherwise, it appears Id just be shooting in the dark.

[necso]

3. Magnetic media is subject to loss.

(I learned to keep multiple copies and check and/or "refresh" (replace) them from time to time.)

Before paying for (complete) recovery, it might be a good idea to get some idea of what kind of shape the tape is in, and get a sample of the data.

Different file types have differing degrees of sensitivity to errors. A messed-up ascii file is one thing, a messed-up database file can be another.