What are these please ?

Miss_Havisham

IMATION TRAVAN NS 20GB

Compatible: Travan NS 20GB (TR-5) Drives/Lecteurs


Been having a sort-out of office stuff from the dim and distant past and found a bag load of these.

Can anyone tell me what they are, how they were used and if they are of any use nowadays ? I believe they have been used but the machine no longer exists so can't tell if they've been "wiped".

Thanks as always

Miss H

chris-j

backup tapes.
Useless with no device but should be securely stored if being retained or destroyed if not as could contain confidential info.

Tiexen

A backup tape technology from Imation Corporation, Oakdale, MN (www.imation.com). Travan evolved from the QIC family of tapes, but uses .315" wide tape rather than quarter inch (the QI in QIC). It also uses different tape guides and improved magnetic media for higher capacities. With Network Series (NS) drives, which provide hardware compression and read-while-write features, Travan migrated from desktop backup to server backup. Travan drives may be compatible with QIC, QIC-Wide and QIC-EX cartridges, but it varies from model to model.

hjibds

These were terrible back in the day, kept eating the tapes, eventuall moved over to DAT tapes, much more upfront cost for the drive but so much more reliable

Mr_Toad

I've got loads of used and new DAT tapes that were for backup. I kept them on the basis that one day I'd buy myself a DAT recorder for music etc.

That's a bus that's long gone!

hjibds

Wow, now you are taking me back, must be 20 years or so ago since I first saw a dat - audio player at the radio station my mum works at

Mr_Toad

hjibds wrote: »

Wow, now you are taking me back, must be 20 years or so ago since I first saw a dat - audio player at the radio station my mum works at

They were the thing to have and only the rich, daft or professional had them. They did start to come down in price but were overtaken by other technology.

I never did get one and they still fetch good money on eBay.

Lum

If you have a device that can read them, you might find some interesting data on them, or you might just chew up the tape.

For gods sake don't store any new data on them though, unless you need to on-paper comply with some legal data retention policy but don't want anyone to actually read it again.

Mr_Toad

Lum wrote: »

If you have a device that can read them, you might find some interesting data on them, or you might just chew up the tape.

For gods sake don't store any new data on them though, unless you need to on-paper comply with some legal data retention policy but don't want anyone to actually read it again.

Back in the day they were the bees knees but by today's standards the capacity is miniscule.

If I remember correctly I used to use Veritas Backup Exec to do the actual backups to tape as it worked on Windows, Linux and Solaris.

I still have a portable scsi drive in the cupboard that I used to make backups of all my development libraries when I was writing applications in C and C++ for Windows and Linux plus all my various *nix shell scripts.

I bet it would still work if only I had a scsi card in any of my machines. I might take it with me next time I visit one of the server rooms and try it. :rotfl:

Lum

Ahh, Backup Exec, always the least-awful backup software, then Symantec bought it.

I've got a box with some old SCSI cards in. I know there is at least an Adaptec 29160 PCI-X card in there (works in a standard PCI slot if you can get it to physically fit). Getting the correct cable may be more fun.