- subscribe to this site
Who Said Tape Was Not Reliable?
Posted by Mark on Oct 23, 2008
Another tape recovery story, but one that shows an impressive level of resilience on the part of an old tape technology. The tape in question was a TK50, leading edge back sometime in the 1980s (and notably the technology from which DLT was developed) and after 20 years of being used each day as the boot media for a manufacturing system it had finally given up and a data recovery was needed.
This means that if the system had been started up daily, and it was, that the tape had been accessed in excess of 5000 times, multiply that by the number of times the tape runs backwards and forwards during loading and the actual tape passes could be 20-30 times this. Credit should be given to late Fred Hertrick and his team for developing such a robust bit of kit.
Before you rush off and try to change your LTO or Super DLT drive for a TK50, they are difficult to get, the media is rare, and one tape holds only a few megabytes and can take quite a few hours to fill so unless you are embarking on some major data downsizing it is not a good idea.
What it does show us though, despite all of the talk about tape being a thing of the past, that tape, as a backup medium, is a mature and fundamentally solid technology. We have data stored on tapes going back to the 1990s that we are still able to access on demand, and where if the media gets dropped on the floor it will still be readable (not a good idea with a hard disk unless you want to give money to a hard drive data recovery engineer ).
Oh yes, the tape from the start, the data was recovered and written to replacement TK50 tapes and the system is back up and running, though there is talk of reviewing its future some time in the next couple of years. We gave them back three copies of the data just in case they want to go on until 2068.
