Recovering data from 4mm and 8mm tapes

-----Original Message----- From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Eric Smith Sent: 24 March 2015 08:30 To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: Recovering data from 4mm and 8mm tapes On Mon, Mar 23, 2015 at 9:59 PM, <healyzh at aracnet.com> wrote: I'm not disputing your statement in general, but I've apparently had better results with DDS interchange than you have. I've used six DDS1 drives from four vendors and three DDS2 drives from two vendors, and didn't have any interchange problems until one of the DDS1 drives somehow became seriously misaligned. I believe this must have been the result of physical trauma causing damage affecting the relative positions of the head drum and the tape on the vertical axis (along the width of the tape), or at least with a signifcant component on that axis, because the track following servo should otherwise be able to compensate for a fair bit of mechanical variation between drives. When the DAT and DDS formats were designed, it was intended that they be robust enough for good interoperation between drives without need for any manual alignment of individual drives. Eric