Services, such as tape media data conversion and migration, offered by Data Analyzers are often straightforward. However, at times our engineers have had to be creative and think out-of-the-box in order to recover data and help our clients to get back on their feet. This is a prime example of their innovative processes and one of the greatest cases we have worked on in 2017:
Magnetic tapes, as data storage devices, have been on the market for a quite a while. It is a system for storing information on magnetic tape using digital recording technology. Although, magnetic tape usually comes packaged in cartridges or cassettes a device that performs writing or reading of data is called a tape drive. Often times tapes are used as a primary data storage device for a variety of applications. One such application was research conducted by our client, a Dental Faculty Practice attached to a major state university.
The study they conducted was based on acquisition of data taken via 5 channel sensors attached to a subject’s jaw. Data acquisition was done via specialized equipment with data stored, you guessed it, on a lot of DDS-2 tape drives. One of the most common obstacles that many of data tape users face is closely related to poor data storage backup planning. As with many other cases, the one person responsible for maintaining original tapes left the organization. In the meantime, their equipment got scattered and this time-consuming research performed from the early 2000s onward got “lost”. Lost only in the sense that they had all these tapes and no device to be able to read them with.
Their tapes included data recordings as 4+1 channel, which needed to be cataloged before we were able to read and convert the data to a useful format. Another issue was that the voltage signals were stored on a DAT tape with a pass band of DC to 10 kHz before digitization. During the data recovery process Data Analyzers engineers were able to migrate and convert user data to a set of WAV files, which our client was able to import to newly acquired software. Overall, tape recovery from 100+ cassettes took just under two weeks to complete.
In the event that you have a legacy system that is no longer supported, Data Analyzers can assist you in the migration of archived data to a format compatible with newer systems. We also offer customized tape data recovery service for the following types: QIC Media, 3.5” Cartridge Series DC2000, 5.25” Cartridge Series, Mini QIC / Travan, Travan Media, Travan NS, 4mm Cartridges, DAT DDS (all formats), 8mm Cartridges, DLT Media, SuperDLT Media, AIT Cartridge Media, MLR / SLR Media All Sizes, LTO Media, Exabyte 8mm, StorageTek series, ADR Media, VXA Media, etc.
If your tape media is not listed please give us a call at 1-866-456-DATA or get started here.
