Windows Server 2008 - AIT Tape drive

[BlueSkies]

Hello,

 

We have a very, very old file server sitting in the cupboard and a pile of equally old backup tapes (found them in a dusty box!!). One of the tapes contains some historical information which someone here would like to access. However - I believe at the time the file server was alive and backing up to the tapes, it was running Server 2003.

I have started the server up and managed to login to it (!) however, I can't see a way of accessing the tape drive. I have copied the old NTBackup files (which is what they used to use to backup to tape when it was running Server 2003) across to the server but when I run it, I cannot "see" the tape drive. Will I need some other drivers to get it going? I had a look on Sony support site, but so far have drawn a blank!

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

[AlanD]

Well... you'll need some software capable of reading and writing - to what is essentially a sequential storage medium. Usually they have a SCSI interface - so you should see something in the device manager under SCSI. As for software - Symantec's Backup Exec can use tapes....including AIT....Not sure if there is anything you can use for free which uses tapes though...

 

AIT was always a nightmare as far as I was concerned. Not sure if I was unlucky - but we used to eat our way through their tape libraries with sony sending us replacement ones from some European distribution centre on next day delivery. Must have cost them a fortune.....Don't think I ever had to recover something in anger - which is just as well because I wouldn't have been very confident of getting the data back. Fortunately our D2D2T seemed to have a reliable set of disks....and we always ran them as a RAID 5 despite this making backups take a bit longer. Was very happy after moving to LTO.