Restore Options after tape drive failure

[pgerke]

Sorry, I'm new and I'm not a Retrospect user, but I do work with NetWorker and Avamar.  One of our departments used Retrospect on a local workstation to backup about 500 GB to LTO tapes back in about 2004.  The LTO drive failed and now they are asking me for help getting the data off of the LTO tapes and moved into our backup environment.  I understand that they have Retrospect 7.5, and haven't had it under support since EMC sold the product, but they do have the install media for that release for Windows XP and probably Server 2003, and I have lots of

 

We have LTO drives in a fibrechannel SAN currently just connected to Linux and HP-UX servers, but one could be connected to a Windows server.  I am hoping that it is easy to do a minimal install of Retrospect onto a server with an LTO drive, and that we could then restore the data from these tapes, without needing any information that might be held in the Retrospect system on the workstation (as long as they didn't do encryption or something else unusual, of course).

 

Am I approaching this the right way?  Does it have to be done from a Windows server, or could I do something with an LTO drive on a Linux server and restore the data?  Would we just be better off to buy another LTO drive, connect it to the workstation, and recover the data from there?

 

Thanks in advance for your help and recommendations.  Please let me know if you need any additional information that I haven't included.

 

Paul

[Mayoff]

The LTO drive containing Retrospect tapes must to connected to the Windows computer running Retrospect.  You will then need to rebuild the catalog file for the tapes by going to Tools>Repair>Recreate from tapes.  Once you rebuild the catalog file, you can restore data from the tapes. 

[pgerke]

Thanks.  Sorry it took me so long to acknowledge your answer.