I went through a similar exercise but had to deal with long deprecated floppy interface tape drives. It took a number of days to source parts and trial and error to get an OS set up to read from them, but in the end it worked... and my BBS lived again inside a DOS emulator!

https://twitter.com/apaprocki/status/550432891201941504

In case anyone else has a stack of long forgotten various QIC formats -- don't lose hope, have patience and restore them :)