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The original was posted on /r/datahoarder by /u/bobj33 on 2025-01-28 16:29:11+00:00.

We get a lot of posts about how tapes can last 30 years or more when stored in good conditions.

I would like to hear some actual experience with restoring old tapes either at home or at work.

What physical format and generation of tape? What software format? tar / dump / etc? When was the tape written? When was it restored? Were there any problems connecting the tape drive? Did the tape drive still work? Were there any errors with the tape either a few bad blocks or complete failure?

When I started working in 1997 the office had already existed for about 10 years. They had tapes on QIC-150, 4mm DDS, 8mm Data8, DLT III. I remember in 1999 having to restore some designs that were written 4-5 years earlier. I went digging through 20 boxes in a closet to find it but the tape itself was labeled well.

One of the drive motors was broken. It had sat unused for at least 3 years. We got another office to Fedex us their drive overnight. Had to buy some SCSI adapters to go from Centronics style to Fast Wide but it worked. Another 4mm tape had a few errors but they always wrote 2 copies and the other was okay. Our 8mm tape drive died but that was after years of multi-gigabyte daily incremental backups so it did its job well.

It would have been much better if they migrated the old designs to newer tape formats every few years instead of just leaving everything in boxes in the closet.

LTO-1 came out in 2000 and I see used LTO-1 tape drives for $20-50 on ebay so it should still be possible to read those 25 year old tapes but just curious what everyone else has seen.