1.18 I keep getting TurboSTORE tapes from customers that I cannot read because I only have FOS STORE. Is there any hope? It appears that compression was used during the STORE.

It is likely that you are getting tapes compressed with HARDWARE compression. FOS RESTORE will restore tapes created by TurboSTORE with software compression.

What to look for? When you put the tape in the drive, do you get an I/O error during AVR? If yes, then the tape was almost certainly created with hardware compression (assuming DDS tape).

Note: third-party vendors of storage products with software compression always include on any tape produced by their product a program in MPE STORE/RESTORE format that can be used to read the tape.