Copying Retrospect 6 tapes?

[EWTHeckman]

I just discovered that Sony has issued a recall on some of their AIT-5 tapes. (That was 2 years ago! So much for paying attention…) Two of those tapes are part of my long term archive from Retrospect 6 which I kept after upgrading to Retrospect 8. Is there any way to copy the contents of these tapes to new tapes?

[rhwalker]

There are at least several ways to accomplish something similar to your goal, but only one of them might do exactly what you want.

 

(1) Run Retrospect 6 (which can read your tapes), do a "Transfer" from that backup set (all of the tape members in that backup set, not just those two) to another. This will create a new backup set with a new name, with the contents of the old tapes (providing that you set the filter for the "Transfer" appropriately), but won't be a copy of the old tapes. If you've only got one tape drive, you could use an intermediate disk backup set, then Transfer that disk backup set to the new tape backup set, or you could go tape to tape, if you've got two tape drives. Here, you will end up with a tape backup set readable by Retrospect 6, which is what you started with. While the tapes won't be "copies" of the originals, the backup set will hold the same data.

 

(2) Convert the Retrospect 6 tapes to Retrospect 8 format using Retrospect 8 (requires a catalog rebuild under Retrospect 8, but doesn't change the tapes), then use Retrospect 8 to copy that media set (f/k/a/ "backup set") to a Retrospect 8 tape media set. Could use the intermediate disk media set method of (1), above, or two tape drives. Requires the advanced tape add-on if you have more than one tape drive attached.

 

(3) Install unix tape drivers (Mac OS X does not have tape drivers, but Tolis Group sells "Tolis Tape Tools", which is a set of unix tape drivers), then use the unix "dd" command (see the man page) to go from one set of tapes to another. This will, in fact, duplicate each tape, and is the only way to solve your problem as stated.

 

The problem with (3) is that it may not be possible to do exactly what you want. Tapes don't store a fixed amount of data. The amount of data varies with the tape length and the inter-block spacing, which changes on modern tape drives to keep the tape moving when the i/o pipeline becomes starved (so that you don't "backhitch"). Because Retrospect writes each tape member until it hits EOT, the amount of data on a tape varies from tape to tape, and there may not be room on the destination (copy) tape to hold all of the data on the source tape.

 

Additionally, you will have to do some futzing around so that the destination tape ends up with the same block size as the source tape.

 

Your question seems like a simple one, but sadly, it's not.

 

Good luck.

 

Russ