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Transferring TK50 media to DVD or CD

G

GreyHairedDECfan

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Dec 5, 2021
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127
Location
Northern Maryland
Looking ahead, when I get my 11/73 running again I will likely need to restore (using BRU on RSX-11M) a TK50 tape image (of a backup or a virgin loading tape that my company distributed back in the day). This is assuming that my RD53 disk is toast.

So I envision doing the BRU from modern media, using an emulated drive on modern hardware (from a laptop, etc.).

Has anyone done this, using a 3rd-party data recovery service to convert old tapes to modern media?
 
If it's still something they do, VCFED does offer this sort of thing as a service: https://vcfed.org/wp/services/data-recovery/

And I'm sure there are data recovery companies out there that deal with vintage media formats.

I have fiddled around with TK50 tape media, still have a stack of them to use whenever I get in the mood to toy around with them, and in my experience they very temperamental as are the drives themselves.
 
Not specifically for a TK50, but I have recovered data from two off TU58 tape cartridges that had not been used for 30 years using a data recovery house. But “reputable” companies are now difficult to find. A few that I had contacted kept asking me about what format my disks were in, despite telling them numerous times (in writing) that they were tape cartridges...

Each tape had bad blocks that could not be recovered. Fortunately, I had two tapes and could resurrect a working tape by merging the good bits of both together!

I did have some bad blocks that were unrecoverable from both tapes. Fortunately, I knew what was on the tapes (and the format it was in) so I could ascertain that what was missing was transient data - so it didn’t matter.

Dave
 
daver2 said:
Not specifically for a TK50, but I have recovered data from two off TU58 tape cartridges that had not been used for 30 years using a data recovery house. But “reputable” companies are now difficult to find. A few that I had contacted kept asking me about what format my disks were in, despite telling them numerous times (in writing) that they were tape cartridges...
Click to expand...

Can you share the POC information for the outfit and what they charged for the effort? THX. paul
 
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