Unknown Windows 98 Backup CDRs from 2002

We don’t often get much call to recover CDs anymore, but this recent case was interesting. We received a set of five CDRs labelled image library backup 2002. The user had no idea what software created them, and just a vague memory that they may have been burned from a Windows 98 PC.

Step 1… Read the discs

As usual, our first task is to read all the discs, and in this case save them to image files (ISO / Bin Files) for scanning later. Due to their age (19 years!), I expected this to be the hard part, but all the discs read well. Good work pink Verbatim DataLifePlus®! In fact there were just six unreadable sectors near the end of the final disc. This seemed like a good point to begin the next phase, and actually see what files I could get from them.

Where the problems start

Mounting the disc images, just showed a single, (un)helpful file.

The reason for such a vague message became clear later. The companies behind this software went through a number of years where they were sold, resold, sold again, rebranded, you name it. I suppose the generic message saved them having to update the code for every different version of the software.

Hex editing

I had a bit of a poke around inside the image files, to look for clues. Aside from the text above, the vast majority of the discs looked like compressed data. This is bad news if you don’t know what compressed them! There were a few little nuggets of metadata, and a few promising repeating strings. These strings lead me to this page. There were some similarities between my disc images, and the example headers from Will’s Zip Disk images. I tried the tools provided by Will, but couldn’t get them to work with my files. I contacted Will to see if he had any ideas, and he was extremely helpful and interested in the project.

The old web

In 2002, it was far more likely that you got your software on floppy disks or CDs, and your tech information from a paper magazine. Anything that was written online back then, has largely fallen into digital disrepair, or disappeared altogether. I’ve never seen so many 404 error pages than when I was trying to research these backup discs.

Think Different™

I’d seen a screenshot of a similar looking readme file, and that post mentioned Backup Exec. I’d heard of Backup Exec as a more recent tool for servers, but didn’t realise it started out as a simple tool to backup Windows PCs to removable media. After trawling though pages of dead links, I eventually found a couple of old versions of backup exec on archive.org. There was even a version named “Seagate Backup Exec for CD-R, Version 5.4” from 1996. It all started to seem so easy.

Spin up the VM

I booted a Windows 98 Virtual Machine, and installed the Seagate version of Backup Exec for CD-R. After a required reboot, the VM failed to boot, so something was incompatible. Old VMs like this can be temperamental, so I didn’t go any further trying to track down the fault.

A problem shared

I was speaking to a friend about this case, as he’d been a Backup Exec user more recently. He didn’t have any other suggestions for me, but after our chat, he sent me a couple of links he’d found. This one in particular mentioned another bit of trivia about the software companies. Apparently another company Stomp Inc once used the code from Backup Exec in a Windows tool called “Simple Backup.”

Back to archive.org, and I found a copy of version 4.61. Had to be worth a try.

I installed this on the Windows 98 VM and rebooted… I half expected it to corrupt the VM again, but this time it booted up fine. Simple backup launched with a Veritas logo animation and then successfully read and restored the CDs. The job was complete. The software was even smart enough to cope with the couple of missing sectors on disc 5.

In total, I extracted around 3.5GB of photos.

Not over yet

Although I’d successfully extracted the files from the backup, they were now trapped inside the Windows 98 VM. Usually VMs can communicate back to the host, but Windows 98 doesn’t easily work that way. To avoid messing around too much, I decided to just mount the virtual disk from Windows 98 to a Windows XP VM, which does have support for sharing files with the host. That got the data back out into the real world!