Data Recovery

[Tom]

Does anyone here do data recovery? I lost a number of files that are/were important to me a couple of years ago. They are backed up on Travan 20 tapes from a Windows 95 OS.

I bought a travan drive for my current system, but it won't read them. Would like some help. Willing to pay something reasonable.

Thinking just restoring all the tapes to DVD.

[Jim]

Step one: Put a dollar value on the data you wish to retrieve. It is possible that recovery may be more than the data is worth.

Perhaps your task will be more of a media transfer vs. data recovery.

Should the task require data recovery, here are my recommendations

Local (Colorado Springs), a nice value:
Shawn Knopp
S.M.A.R.T. Data Recovery
www.SMART-DataRecovery.com (http://www.smart-datarecovery.com)

I've met Shawn a few times (used to live in Fort Collins) and he's done two or three jobs for me. I'm satisfied.

The grand daddy data recovery service :
Kroll-Ontrak
www.KrollOntrack.com (http://www.krollontrack.com/)

I've used Kroll twice (before I met Shawn), both jobs were exactly as desired, aside from cost [$700 & $1500]

I might be able to process a media transfer for you. I do not have a Travan drive so I'd look to use the one you purchased (or would purchase one should yours be the issue). Do you know the model of drive you used when the tapes were written? Do you know the software that was used?

[Jim]

On the issue of what was the original writing drive...

Travan is standardized under the QIC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarter-inch_cartridge) body. HP Colorado (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=HP_Colorado&action=edit&redlink=1), Iomega DittoMax (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Iomega_DittoMax&action=edit&redlink=1) and AIWA Bolt (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=AIWA_Bolt&action=edit&redlink=1) are proprietary versions of the Travan format.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travan

[Tom]

I no longer have the original hardware. I believe I backed up using the win 98 built in backup utility. To that I googled and found MS had Veritas write their backup. Further googling indicates that Stomp now owns the Veritas line and that perhaps their Backup My PC software would read it. Since that was available on Ebay for 14 bucks shipped I bought it and will post to this thread if it works once I receive it. Jim yes it really is a data transfer but since I can't currently read the tapes is seems like a data recovery operation. 700+ bucks is more than I'm willing to spend on this since I've already spent 100 on a device that won't read them.

I'm attempting to recovery genealogy data that I spent 5 years of my life working on. I still have the hard copy of the data but not willing to re enter it into Family Tree Maker. Fortunately I posted most of it on a genealogy website but the format that site uses is not importable into my software. It came to a head yesterday when a professor at a Southern university inquired about my early family for research he is doing into the occupation of the U.S. town during the Civil War. Seems someone, a cousin, was in the NY 56th and a captain of the troops doing the occupation. Would have been nice to be able to send him the data rather than trying to remember most of it off the top of my head.