title: Recovering '90s Data Tapes - Experiences From the KB Web Archaeology project
creators: Johan van der Knijff
abstract: <p>The recovery of digital data from tape formats from the mid to late &#39;90s is not well covered by existing digital preservation and forensics literature. This paper addresses this knowledge gap with a discussion of the hardware and software that can be used to read such tapes. It introduces tapeimgr, a user-friendly software application that allows one to read tapes in a format-agnostic manner. It also presents workflows that integrate the discussed hardware and software components. It then shows how these workflows were used to recover the contents of a set of DDS-1, DDS-3 and DLT-IV tapes from the mid to late &#39;90s. These tapes contain the source data of a number of &quot;lost&quot; web sites that the National Library of the Netherlands (KB) is planning to reconstruct at a later stage as part of its ongoing Web Archaeology project. The paper also presents some first results of sites from 1995 that have already been reconstructed from these tapes.</p>
keywords: tapes digital preservation digital forensics web archaeology