Software overview

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Software overview

Tapewyrm has three command-line tools. Each one owns one stage of a recovery, and each stage writes a file the next one reads, so you can stop after any step and continue later on another machine.

Tool Stage Reads Writes Needs hardware
tw Capture and convert The drive, through the Greaseweazle; TWRF captures TWRF captures; TWTI/TWTZ tape images dump, info, drive, update, dfu only
qicsilver Recover TWTI/TWTZ tape images TWVL volumes; tar files and damage reports No
cinnabar Inspect TWRF captures; TWTI/TWTZ tape images Nothing (a viewer); optional screenshots No

Which tool do I need?

  • Reading a tape for the first time: tw to dump and convert it, then qicsilver to get the files out. Read a tape walks through the whole sequence.
  • A tape image that won't identify or extract cleanly: qicsilver identify and qicsilver inspect to see what it is, then qicsilver read overrides if no profile fits.
  • Damaged or marginal reads: cinnabar to see where a track goes wrong, flux to bytes, and which of several passes read each segment best.

Running the tools

All three run from the source tree with uv, with no install step:

uv run --project packages/tapewyrm-cli tw --help
uv run --project packages/qicsilver qicsilver --help
uv run --project packages/cinnabar cinnabar --help

With just, the same commands are just tapewyrm ARGS, just qicsilver ARGS and just cinnabar ARGS. See Install the tools.

See also