Colorado Tape and Drive

[Brian Opp]

Hello,
I'm an Admin of a small Engineering company. The company used to use Colorado tapes to do backups. I need to read an Imation DC2120 XL 170MB, XIMAT formatted tape, but no longer have any Colorado drives.

I found a few drives on Ebay, but am not sure which capacities will read this tape, ie 250MB, 5GB, or 8GB. Am I correct in saying that any of these will read my 170MB tape?

Can anyone confirm which drive I'll need?

[Lewis Finch]

Brian, I wish it were that simple. You also need to know what software was used to create the tape. For one that old it was most likely a DOS based program. If the data is critical you might consider using a data recovery service. It's not that expensive anymore and I can offer some recommendations.

[Brian Opp]

Yes, It would be a big help to get the names of some data retrieval services.

thanks,
Brian

[Lewis Finch]

This company will give discounts to HP customers and they have locations in the US,
http://www.vogon.co.uk/

[Brian Opp]

Hello again,

I found the software for the backups...It's ColoradoBackup v2.8 for DOS/Win95. So, with that, I would like to persue buying a drive for $20 rather than sending the tape to a retrieval service for a couple hundred $$$. How then would I go about trying to determine a drive that will read these QIC-80 formatted tapes?

thanks,
Brian

[Lewis Finch]

Any of the Jumbo drives 250,700,1400

[Brian Opp]

Okay thanks! I found a Colorado T1000 on Ebay that claims to read/write to QIC-80 tapes. I think I'll try this.

thanks for your help.
Brian