Trying to restore data from a 8 year old LTO 6 tapes

Hello everyone ! I am a freelance geospatial engineer specialized in LiDAR for government application. Lots of data that needs to be retained for a long time.

I switched my backup solution to commvault installed on a server (windows server 2019) with a TS4300 IBM library about 3 years ago when I needed to upgrade my backup solution. I switched to LTO8 tapes with two drives.

I was using Data Protector before that with LTO6 tapes and I am just finding out that my TS4300 library will not read those…bummer. I am looking for a solution right now but I am thorn between some options.

Buy a used external LTO6 tape drive, either with USB (Dont even know if that exists) SFP or fiber port and buy the required PCIE adaptor. I might even already have the correct PCIE card since I kept the old ones from the decomissioned HP server. That solution will cost me around 800$ and no garantee the drive works with the PCIE cards I have.

Hire an external company to restore the data on disks

Buy a used external LTO6 tape drive with fiber port. Unplug one of my used port on my 2019 server, plug the external drive, restore and plug back everything like it was.

Any bit of advice is helpful 🙂

EDIT: Many thanks to everyone who chimed in to help. In a twist of fate, I found out the LTO6 HP library is still on premise (This kind of thing NEVER happens) and I still have the controller cards from the server that was thrown out 2 years ago. I even found a fibre cable to link the library to a workstation that is in my server room.

I am deploying data protector and installing hardware, just hoping the data is not encrypted with an unknown password !