Recovering from backup tapes
Plenty of organisations still hold an archive of backup tapes from the years when that was the standard way to protect data — and every so often it turns out that the material they need is precisely there. We handle recovery from tapes across a range of technologies, including cases where a tape has been partially overwritten.
Common technologies
- LTO, all generations
- DAT / DDS
- DLT and Super DLT
- DITTO
- and other formats
The process
To give you a price for tape recovery we first need the tapes for assessment. During that assessment we check the tape's physical and logical condition, identify the operating system and backup software that were in use, and gather the further details needed to judge how complex the recovery will be and how long it should take. A quote follows the assessment.
Why it takes time
Tape is sequential media: you cannot jump to a particular point, you have to read from the beginning. On top of that, a drive matching the specific format and generation is required, and sometimes the proprietary backup format itself has to be decoded. Together those make tape recovery a comparatively long process — but in many cases it is the only route to the material.
Looking after a tape archive
If you hold a tape archive that still matters, it is worth migrating it to modern media. Tapes degrade, and the drives that can read them are disappearing from the market — what is readable today will not necessarily be readable in ten years.