There are many people that are both curious and skeptical on how can tape compete with their counterpart, harddisk drive. When the tape lost its data, it have to perform a tape data recovery immediately so as to prevent further losses that could have an negative impact on the business operations of organizations.
Even with a solid plastic casing protect the tape within, the tape cartridge like any other storage devices, can be damaged from smoke, water, or dropping the cartridge from high levels. Extreme exposure to high temperatures, its internal mechanism of the tape might fails, thus causing errors located within the tape’s surface.
With more organizations using tape as a storage media, damages done by water, absence of oxide, folds in the tape material, sliced edges, bad oxide and even frictional damage tape data can be recovered from tapes. There are generally two types of tape data recovery. These are known as physical recovery and logical recovery.
What is physical recovery for a tape data?
When there is a physical damage on the tape, a physical tape recovery is applicable. Physical damage such as cartridge crack, tape damage, failure in the internal mechanism of the tape and etc may prevents the data from being read efficiently.
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.
There are lots of companies or stores promise a high recovery rate from using physical recovery methods. They claimed that they have over 98 percent success rate of their recovery techniques.
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.
Can logical recovery help in tape data recovery?
Due to its complicated procedures, logical tape data recovery is much more expensive in most cases.
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.
In order for the technician to execute the recovery procedures properly, he has to use multiple versions of the tape 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.