Does anyone have any insights into how to read files from a tape created using NTBackup?
The situation is as follows. Several months ago, my office migrated a key piece of software from a local server to a vendor hosted solution. The old box had run Windows Server 2003. Every night we used NTBackup to write important files to tape. These were full, not incremental backups. The drive was a DAT72 model. I can't remember if we used compression or not.
Now we need to retrieve a file off the old server. Naturally we've already reprovisioned it and wiped the hard drives leaving only the backups. Currently the box runs Debian 7.8. While we have other computers around, the one in question is a Dell PowerEdge 2800 and the tape drive has a SCSI connection. No other machines in our office has such a slot so I can't just hook the drive up elsewhere. The only good news is read/write to and from a blank tapes works.
Tar won't read the tape saying it's not a tar archive. I managed to find a utility which will read the MTF format NTBackup used. Unfortunately it only reads the metadata such as media name, description, etc. I can't seem to list the files, much less extract them. Does anyone have any insights? My goal is to list the files on the tape and ensure they can be retrieved.
UPDATE: I was able to dd something from the tape to a file. It was only 64Kb so the command probably only read one block. Combined with the realization I can use /dev/nst0 instead of /dev/st0 this feels like a progress.