I think I have mentioned, either here or certainly at PLUG social gatherings, that I'm currently working on organizing ancient backups. I restored a bunch of 4mm DDS1 and DDS3 tapes and am currently working on DC600A tapes (QIC24 format, ~60MB per cartridge). The latter date from 1992-1993 and straddle my adoption of Linux. So, the earlier tapes are written with a DOS program called SYTOS, and the later ones are tar archives. I am currently dealing with the very common problem with quarter-inch cartridge (QIC) tapes that the "tension bands" have stretched or broken in the 30 years since they were commonly in use. There are a slew of other potential problems as well, that I am not plagued with so far.
Among the files that I recovered from the 4mm tapes are Microsoft backups (*.qic from Windows 95 and *.bkf from Windows 2000). The backup scheme I was employing a the time in the early 2000s was to back up the Microsoft machines in the office to a Samba share and then backup those files from Linux on to tape. I am now interested in archiving the files contained within the qic and bkf files. Apparently, the only way to do that is it spin up an era-specific version (windows 95 or 98 for the qic files, and windows 2000 or xp for the bkf files) to use the Microsoft programs to restore the constituent files. I can install the Microsoft OS and necessary tools in a virtual machine easily enough (still painful, but ... with enough anesthesia still possible), but the problem I'm confronted with is how to most easily get the backups and restorations in and out of the VM. The *.qic files alone amount to a few dozen gigabytes, which is at least doubled in the restoration. Support for guest tools for sharing space seem to be missing for these early windows systems, so that qemu can't easily share a folder with the guest. I *think* I am going to have to either give the guest OS a gigantic file system, inject the backps into that filesystem by mounting it from the host, and then fish out the extrications in a similar manner, OR I need to spin up some Samba server and mount a SMB share from the guest. I don't have an existing SMB server on the premises as our household is, in the vernacular, a Linux shop. Has anyone done this and have advice on what's the most direct path here? TIA, -- Russell Senior [email protected]
