Our office has two data cartridges which we found in a file cabinet during a recent campus move. The labels on the cartridges suggest that they may include important historical data which I would like to include in a predictive modeling analysis for an upcoming project.
The problem is–we can’t access the data, because we no longer have equipment which will read the cartridges. We’ve talked to a number of local vendors to see if they can process the cartridges, so far without success. My attempts to research information about document retrieval services which can handle these cartridges have only identified tons and tons of these cartridges for sale, which seems a bit pointless…$50 and up for a single cartridge which holds a whopping 525 MB of data!
The cartridges are Imation DC 6525 cartridges which look like these, containing 525 MB of data. The data is in a format known as .qic, and the cartridges were used in QIC 120/150 format tape drives.
If anybody knows of a document retrieval service on the East Coast or which does mail-order work which can handle these cartridges, I’d be very grateful.
You can get QIC 120 drives on ebay for reasonable prices. Find an older PC with a floppy cable interface and you can roll your own. IIRC some external units worked off a parallel port.
Having dealt with QIC 120 tapes back in the day I will forewarn you that that they may not be 100% reliable. A tape that has been stored for over 10 years may have significant bleed through or other issues to the point the information is corrupted.