Reply to post: Re: Informal poll on whether you've ever had to do something like this

Re: Informal poll on whether you've ever had to do something like this

Not an old system, but old tapes. They held backups of the Student Information Systems data for a university, and they had tapes going back to the first computer. It was the lead programmers job, along with the operators' job to copy them to new media. This meant pulling the tapes from the vault, cleaning all of the drives, and mounting the tapes. If a tape wouldn't read on drive 1, they'd move it to drive 2, and so on, until they had tried all of the drives. If a tape still wouldn't read, they'd call the support engineer and have him tweak the drive's tape speed, capstan speed, etc, until they could get a good copy. To their credit, I don't know of any data request they weren't able to fulfill while I worked there.