keenerb wrote on 2021-09-15, 03:06:

Everything was recovered. Earliest tape was simply a tar archive, second tape I recovered by dd on all the tape files, concatting them together, and converting to a tar with mtftar.

I also now have about twenty new dds3 tapes and a brand new dds4 drive setup in one of my linux servers, might as well put those to use, maybe in another fifteen years I can make another post asking how to recover THOSE tapes...

That is great news, glad it worked for you .