Tape Data Recovery? Is It Easy To Perform

Posted in: Backup |
by Edmund Smith

In this 21st century, information technology has become a part of our lives, we simply can’t do without it. The usage of tape drive has virtually lost over to other media of storage. However, for those who are curious of what is tape data recovery. This article is for you. It is the recovery of any data that has been lost on a tape, obviously, but what it involves is quite interesting.

Although the tape cartridge is a piece of durable storage media, it can still be damaged from smoke, water, or simply dropping it to the ground. It’s life span can be shortened by extreme exposure from high temperature, internal failure mechanism, or sector-errors that are situated right in the middle of the tape’s life.

Tape data can been recovered from damages caused by water, missing and bad oxide, sliced edges, and even friction damage. These data are recovered using 2 types of recovery methods, namely physical recovery and logical recovery. Read more to understand these recovery methods can help you to maintain your data effectively.

What is needed for a physical tape recovery?

It is needed from there is an actual physical damage to the tape. It can be something to do with the plastics or the cartridge that are preventing the data to be read properly.

Physical damages are needed due to the deterioration of magnetic coatings on the actual tape surface, cracked wheels, twisted tape, creased tape edges, broken tape, stretched tape, or any other damages connected with the actual tape itself.

Most places that are dealing in tape data recovery guarantee a high physical recovery rate of 98%. They claimed that they have trained professionals to execute this type of task.

You may quickly need to bring your storage device to those highly trained recovery experts for recovery procedures, once you felt that you have damaged your tape storage device if it has been dropped in the mud, water or fall from high levels.

What is logical recovery?

Logical tape data recovery is more complicated than physical recovery, and is also more expensive than the normal recovery techniques.

We need logical recovery when the data is unable to read or write even though it has been successfully recorded onto the tape itself. Or there are no visible form of damage to the tape and the tape body itself.

The recovery of datafiles in logical recovery requires the expert professional to use multiple versions of the recovery software and take many “passes” at the tape using it.

You can easily pieced back the damage or lost tape data, but the rate of success of logical tape data recovery is much lower than physical tape recovery.

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