Thanks for the reminder. I have to double check this: I believe that East Anglia (CRU) was tasked by the international community to gather and archive ALL country’s climate data, and that many of those countries turned all their raw records to CRU. IF this understanding of mine is correct, the raw data is gone gone gone, and can not be recovered, unless somebody somewhere has a 9-track or disk file that they copied a particular country or data station to while they were examining that particular part of the data.
Unless they've been stored properly, 9-track tapes degrade over time and it becomes nearly impossible to read the data. I've been through this, trying to retrieve data from 20 year old 9-tracks and finding that as I FSF'd into the volume, the tape was stuck together and I could only read the very beginning of the tape.