#  Building the Weird Stuff - The 20-Tape Road Trip 

 

### Article Index

- [ Building the Weird Stuff ](/blog/personal/building-the-weird-stuff)
- [ The 20-Tape Road Trip ](/blog/personal/building-the-weird-stuff?start=1)
- [ Bandwidth Chaos, Tamed ](/blog/personal/building-the-weird-stuff?start=2)
- [ COBOL to the Rescue ](/blog/personal/building-the-weird-stuff?start=3)
- [ Silent Alarm Fix ](/blog/personal/building-the-weird-stuff?start=4)
- [ Decoding the Unreadable ](/blog/personal/building-the-weird-stuff?start=5)
- [ Why the Weird Stuff Matters ](/blog/personal/building-the-weird-stuff?start=6)
- [ All Pages ](/blog/personal/building-the-weird-stuff?showall=1)
 
 



Page 2 of 7

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## The 20-Tape Road Trip

A data recovery gig on the East Coast came with a twist: only 20 SDLT2 backup tapes (200GB each) could leave the facility at a time, and they couldn’t travel more than 15 miles. Oh, and the client had no clue how the backups were made. After analyzing a single test tape in Texas, we cracked the method—network backups of an Active Directory domain. To restore them, we’d need to recreate the network and AD structure.

Here’s where it gets weird: I wrote the automation software on a laptop in the passenger seat of a rental van packed with computers and robotic tape changers, coding from Dallas to Boston. It worked flawlessly on arrival. Problem solved, no hitch.

 

 

- [  Prev ](/blog/personal/building-the-weird-stuff "Building the Weird Stuff")
- [ Next  ](/blog/personal/building-the-weird-stuff?start=2 "Bandwidth Chaos, Tamed")



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