We get occasional requests to read data from old DDS or Exabyte tapes. Since we’ve long-ago removed tape drives from individual workstations, we now only support a single shared tape reading machine. AIPS tapes have a pretty simple format — sequential files of FITS data — but you have to use a specific block size of 28800 to read the tape correctly.
We use a script that just reads all FITS files off the tape into the current directory. I finally got around to cleaning up that script yesterday and adding more safeties, etc. I’ve posted the result on my github page in the hopes that it’s useful to others.
