On Wednesday, November 8th, 2023 at 12:02 PM, Russell Senior <russ...@personaltelco.net> wrote:
> 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 > russ...@personaltelco.net If you go the samba route, you would need to monkey with the config to set the older SMB/CIFS version. I doubt a windows version that old will talk to the default samba setup. What you may want to try is setting up your old windows OS with multiple virtual disks. C:\ for the os, then a D:\ that can hold the backup files. Some of the virtual disk formats used by qemu can be mounted directly. So you copy the data over via the host, boot the VM, and all necessary files are accessible in your virtual D:\. You'll just want to make sure that the modern filesystem tools in linux know not to try to automagically correct the filesystem created by windows 95. -Ben
