[ale] OT- Re: Cd-r life

[Jim Kinney]

I'll second Greg's suggestions. Magnetic tape is fairly durable kept away
from external magnetic fields and excessive heat and moisture. The base
plastic is damaged by extreme cold and organic fumes.

For most tapes, a simple read/write cycle is all they need periodically.
That requires either two drives (ideal) or a read then write cycle. The big
magnetic domains of older media have more magnetic material holding the data
but the drive heads were not as precise as the new ones.

If you find working tape drives, keep a known-good working spare sealed in a
static-proof bag with the moisture absorber packet. Lock the package in a
fire safe at normal room temp.

Ask NASA about extracting data from old tapes that no longer have working
drives and the engineers who designed them are dead.

On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 11:00 AM, Greg Freemyer <greg.freemyer at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 10:15 AM, Chris Fowler
> <cfowler at outpostsentinel.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, 2010-10-04 at 09:58 -0400, Jim Kinney wrote:
> >> 90+% or archival needs are environmental. magnetic media, optical
> >> media, film, all require lightless, temperature and humidity
> >> conditions to be met for maximum  lifespan.
> >
> > Crap,  are you tell me those quarter-inch carts I have in the attic that
> > have been there for over 12yrs are worthless?
>
> I was once hired to attempt a recovery from various tape / floppy /
> etc. media stored in a basement for almost 10 years.  We had little or
> no luck as I recall, but what little luck we did have was with
> quarter-inch carts!
>
> So if you're serious, I would pull em down and make new copies asap.
>
> Unless you have huge bucks to spend, the best you can realistically do
> is get half a dozen tape drives from ebay and try the tapes on them
> one at a time.  One of the largest tape recovery companies in the
> country is here in Piedmont Center (emag).  Even they don't do much
> more than that.  (I had assumed they would try to adjust the tracking
> etc. of their drives to get them to align with mis-aligned media, but
> in general they don't do that.)
>
> Greg
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>



-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III
I would rather stumble along in freedom than walk effortlessly in chains.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20101004/b663745f/attachment.html