Archive for August 24th, 2009
TK50 data recovery, look out for media degradation
August 24th, 2009 | Author: Mark
TK50 was a major player in tape backup on VAX/VMS systems several years ago. Being fundamentally ½” (half inch) tape of the type used in open reel drives, but housed as DLT style cartridge, it suffers from the same long term storage problems as some brands of 1/2″ media. TK50 drives could store 70MB of data, and took quite a long time to fill, so have long since ceased to be a viable backup option even if you can find drives and media. But, there are a surprising number of tapes out there with data on them and recent weeks seem to have brought forth a flurry of requests to get data from them, and in one case to copy some. In a high proportion of these cases the data transfer operation has ended up being a data recovery exercise involving considerable work in the lab.
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