Recovering '90s Data Tapes - Experiences From the KB Web Archaeology project

The recovery of digital data from tape formats from the mid to late '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 '90s. These tapes contain the source data of a number of "lost" 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.