Tapewyrm¶

Tapewyrm recovers QIC-40, QIC-80, QIC-3010 and QIC-3020 floppy-tape minicartridges with a Greaseweazle v4.1. It reads raw flux from the tape and decodes it offline into ordinary tar files that keep the backup's own file names, dates and attributes. It also writes a report listing anything that could not be recovered.

These were the "floppy tape" backup drives of the 1990s: the Colorado (later HP Colorado), Conner, Iomega Ditto and similar QIC-117 drives that plug into a PC floppy controller. Tapewyrm replaces that controller with a Greaseweazle running Tapewyrm firmware.

Bench software

Tapewyrm works on real tapes, but it is pre-release. Commands, file formats and profiles can change between versions. Keep your raw captures: you can decode them again with newer software, but an old tape may not survive another read.

How it works¶

 tape in drive
      |  tw dump              hardware: one Logical Forward pass per track
      v
 track-NN.twrf                TWRF: raw flux + drive identity
      |  tw convert           offline: flux -> MFM -> sectors -> Reed-Solomon; merges dumps
      v
 NAME.twti / NAME.twtz        TWTI: logical tape image (TWTZ = zstd-compressed)
      |  qicsilver identify   cartridge, header, volume table (read only)
      |  qicsilver extract    QIC-122 decompression, QIC-113 offsets
      v
 vol-NN.twvl                  TWVL: one backup volume, with its holes
      |  qicsilver tar
      v
 NAME.tar + damage report

Only tw dump, tw info, tw drive, tw update and tw dfu need the hardware. Every later step runs offline, on any machine.

Where to start¶

If you want to	Read
Set up the tools and read your first tape	Getting started
Look up a `tw` command or option	tw reference
Get files out of a tape image	qicsilver reference
Look at what is on the tape, track by track	cinnabar
Check whether your drive is supported	Drives
Understand the on-tape formats	Formats
Work on the code	Development
Read or write Tapewyrm's own file formats	Specifications

The tools¶

Tool	Package	Does
`tw`	`tapewyrm-cli`	Talks to the Greaseweazle and the drive. Dumps tracks to TWRF, converts captures to TWTI images, flashes firmware.
`qicsilver`	`qicsilver`	Reads TWTI/TWTZ images: identifies the cartridge and backups, extracts volumes, writes tar files. No hardware.
`cinnabar`	`cinnabar`	A viewer for captures and images: flux, records, fields and bytes, lane by lane.

The libraries underneath are qiclib (the QIC formats) and tapewyrm-archive (Tapewyrm's own file formats).

License¶

Tapewyrm is public domain under The Unlicense. The firmware is derived from the Greaseweazle firmware by Keir Fraser, also under The Unlicense. The QIC standards in docs/qic-standards/ belong to their publishers and are not covered by The Unlicense.