Getting started¶

These pages take you from a QIC-117 floppy-tape drive on the bench to a tar file of the backup on the tape. They assume a Greaseweazle v4.1 and a drive Tapewyrm has a profile for. The Colorado Jumbo 350, the Colorado 1400 and the TEAC FT-3010 have been tested; see Drives.

Work through them in order the first time:

Install the tools: uv, the repository, and the three commands tw, qicsilver and cinnabar.
Flash the Greaseweazle with the Tapewyrm firmware.
Wire up a drive: cable, power and drive selection.
Read a tape: dump, convert, identify, extract, tar.
Troubleshooting, when a step does not do what the page says.
Keep captures private. Read this before you dump a tape you did not write yourself.

The pipeline¶

A tape passes through three file formats on its way to a tar file. Each format is the complete hand-off to the next step, so you can stop after any step and continue later, on another machine, without the hardware.

 tape in drive
   |
   |  tw dump            (hardware: Greaseweazle + drive)
   v
 captures/mytape/track-NN.twrf     TWRF: raw flux, one file per track pass
   |
   |  tw convert         (no hardware)
   v
 captures/mytape.twtz              TWTI/TWTZ: logical tape image, every segment
   |
   |  qicsilver identify (what is on it)
   |  qicsilver extract
   v
 captures/mytape-vols/vol-NN.twvl  TWVL: one backup volume, decompressed
   |
   |  qicsilver tar
   v
 captures/mytape.tar               pax tar of the files
 captures/mytape.tar.damaged.txt   damage report: what could not be recovered

Step	Command	Input	Output	Reference
Capture	`tw dump`	the tape	TWRF captures and `dump.jsonl`	tw dump, TWS-1 TWRF
Decode	`tw convert`	TWRF captures	TWTI (`.twti`) or TWTZ (`.twtz`) image	tw convert, TWS-2 TWTI/TWTZ
Identify	`qicsilver identify`	image	a summary of the header and volume table	qicsilver identify
Extract	`qicsilver extract`	image	one TWVL file per volume	qicsilver extract, TWS-3 TWVL
List	`qicsilver inspect`	volume or image	a `tar tv`-style listing	qicsilver inspect
Archive	`qicsilver tar`	volume or image	tar file and damage report	qicsilver tar

Two programs split the work. tw owns everything that touches the Greaseweazle and the drive, plus the flux-to-image step. qicsilver reads images and needs no hardware, no USB stack and no drive profiles. cinnabar is a viewer for captures and images; use it to see where a tape is damaged (cinnabar).

tw inspect FILE shows the header of any of the three formats (tw inspect).

Next steps¶

Install the tools.