The tape library is a robot in a cabinet that picks tapes from slots and puts them in drives, and it logs every mount. Every night at two it mounts a tape from a slot the catalogue says is empty. It reads the whole tape. The bytes go to a host that is not on the network. And the operator console, which shows what is being read, shows a directory listing, one user's files, from a company whose name was on the building before ours.
I am the storage engineer at a data centre and the tape library is the last piece of kit in the building that I can hear working.
The library.
A cabinet the size of a wardrobe with two thousand tape slots and six drives and a robot arm that fetches tapes when a backup job asks. Every mount is logged: slot, tape barcode, drive, job, bytes read. It is a catalogue and a robot and it does what the catalogue says.
At two every night it mounts slot zero.
Slot zero.
There is no slot zero. The slots start at one. The catalogue has no zero. The robot goes to a position at the bottom of the cabinet, below slot one, where there is a blank panel, and its gripper closes, and the log shows a tape in the gripper, barcode unreadable, and it carries it to drive six and loads it.
Drive six reads. A full tape, the old size, six hours to read end to end. The bytes go, the log says, to a host, and the host name is not in our network and does not answer and the switch shows the traffic leaving the library and arriving nowhere.
The operator console, which shows the file list of whatever is being read, shows a home directory. One user. Documents, mail, a folder of photographs, a folder called personal. The user name is initials and a surname. The company path at the top of the tree is a company that had this building before we did, and went under, and left.
What has been checked.
The library, by the vendor, who watched the robot pick a tape from a blank panel and load it and read it and would not put a hand in the cabinet.
Drive six, opened, at half past two, by me, with the read in progress. Empty. The heads moving, the reels turning, the tension arms doing what they do with a tape in them, and no tape. The bytes going out. The console showing a file called, at that moment, letter to mum.
Slot zero, by me, with the panel off. Behind the panel there is a space. Not a slot. A space the shape of a tape, in the frame, that the robot goes to, and in the space, on the metal, a rectangle where the paint is less faded, the size of a barcode label, and the rectangle is warm.
Who.
The company that had the building went under in the crash, all at once, the way they did, and the staff were sent home on a Friday and the doors were locked and the kit was sold to us with the building. The tapes were wiped before the sale, as they should have been, by an engineer who was, the sale documents say, retained for one week after the closure to do exactly that.
One tape was not wiped. One user's home directory. His own, I would guess, and I have been through the files on the console as they go past and it is a man's life, a job, letters, photographs of a garden, and the last file in the tree, by date, is a letter to a bank about a house.
The engineer was not retained after the week. I found him in the paper, from the year after, in a paragraph.
He is restoring himself. Every night, from slot zero, to a host that is his old workstation, which is gone, and the restore never completes, because the destination is not there, and the tape is read end to end anyway, and the next night it starts again.
What is done about it.
The mount is on the library log as a slot fault and the vendor has offered to disable the arm's travel below slot one, and I have said no, and they have not asked why, because vendors do not.
What I do.
I run storage.
A restore needs a destination. That is all that is wrong with it. So I built one. A host, on our network, with his old workstation's name, which I got from the console, and a disk with room on it, and I have put it on the library's network and told nobody.
The bytes go there now. The restore, for the first time, completes. The log at eight in the morning says, job complete, bytes verified, and the disk has a home directory on it with a man's name, and I have not opened it, because it is not mine.
And the next night the robot goes to slot zero, and the gripper closes on nothing, and the log says, no tape in slot, and the arm goes back to its rest, and I think that was all it was for, and I have left the host up, with its one directory on it, backed up nightly to a real tape in a real slot, because a thing that took that long to restore should not be lost again for want of a catalogue entry.