Comment by stepupmakeup

It's not just limited to tape, most archiving and backup software is proprietary. It's impossible to open Acronis or Macrium Reflect images without their Windows software. In Acronis's case they even make it impossible to use offline or on a server OS without paying for a license. NTBackup is awfully slow and doesn't work past Vista, and it's not even part of XP POSReady for whatever reason, so I had to rip the exe from a XP ISO and unpack it (NTBACKUP._EX... I forgot microsoft's term for that) because the Vista version available on Microsoft's site specifically checks for longhorn or vista.

Then there's slightly more obscure formats that didn't take off in the western world, and the physical mediums too. Not many people had the pleasure of having to extract hundreds of "GCA" files off of MO disks using obscure Japanese freeware from 2002. The English version of the software even has a bunch of flags on virustotal that the standard one doesn't. And there's obscure LZH compression algorithms that no tool available now can handle.

I've found myself setting up one-time Windows 2000/XP VMs just to access backups made after 2000.