In July of 1998, I purchased an HP Colorado T3000 tape drive and media. Prior to making the purchase, I researched the product as thoroughly as possible, including directing specific questions to HP Colorado, in order to make sure that it would meet my needs, among which were that the drive would be able to read the QIC-80 tapes in my archives, that were created with my Colorado Jumbo 250 drive. HP's literature and technical support people assured me that it would. Following my purchase, I found that the drive would not read the QIC-80 tapes, and that the 'Colorado Backup Software' (written by Cheyene Software, for HP) was so flawed as to be useless. I spent almost a month exchanging over 200 pages of e-mail orrespondence with HP's various 'technical support' personnel before they would finally answer a few simple questions which allowed me to determine that the drive was faulty (and not some other factor). I then exchanged the drive at the place of purchase, and found that the new drive could, in fact, read QIC-80 tapes, but that the Colorado Backup Software could not handle the data contained therein if they were created with any other software than Colorado backup, or with any type of data-compression, despite the other software being in total conformance with QIC-80 tape and QIC-117 data-compression standards, and the tapes being readable by every other QIC-compliant software package.

Here is a step by step manual guide for Colorado T3000 Tape Drive software. It is available to install for models from manufacturers such as Hp and others.

The response of HP Technical Support was laughable: They claimed that no other company besides HP conformed to the QIC standards, and that they 'didn't support any other backup products', including tapes created by previous versions of their own software. I then downloaded (at great expenditure of time) the latest version of HP Colorado Backup software because it was purportedly Y2K compliant, and that which was supplied with the drive was not, and in hopes that some of the program flaws might also have been addressed. I discovered that the software was not only not Y2K compliant, but it wasn't even Y1998 compliant [i.e. It couldn't perform a simple comparison of two dates accurately], and was even more flawed than the previous version. I then downloaded, tested and eventually purchased the Seagate BED98 v3.0 product, which (although not without it's own faults) did work with the HP drive, and could read the QIC-80 tapes and backup files contained therein. For the moment, all was satisfactory, and my tape archives were no longer unreadable. [I subsequently discovered that HP has replaced the HP Colorado Backup Software written by Cheyenne, the same software with which 'technical support' denied there being any problems, with a customized subset of BED98!

Therefore, presumably I could have 'upgraded' to the HP Colorado Backup Software II at far less cost, and achieved similar results, had anyone at HP had the consideration and knowledge to inform me of the option. On the other hand, since the software supplied with the drive was useless, it behooved HP to offer a free copy, or at least a free trial copy, of the replacement software.] Then, after a few months of satisfactory performance, and my subsequent purchase and use of additional media, the tape media removal sensor began to malfunction. It became necessary for me to power the computer (or at least the tape drive) off and back on in order to change media! This was extremely inconvenient at best, especially since the drive does not have it's own power switch, and the malfunction made spanned-media backups impossible!

Teksti dlya izucheniya russkogo yazika dlya nachinayuschih. Hello, I ' m calling from the Wall Street Bank. Can I talk to Mr.Maguire?