8 Apr
2006
8 Apr
'06
5:48 a.m.
(1) did the band formulation change in the early
'90s to eliminate
the problem?
Not that I know of. I just think the useful life is limited to 10-15
years.
I don't think the designers of these tapes ever thought about the
need to read
a tape written 20+ years in the future.
since they seem to be being dropped rapidly, and many
computers
won't bootstrap
off of anything else, it looks like there might be a
problem in
about 5 years.
There has actually been serious problems with keeping the drives
going as well
as the pinch roller decomposes. Be VERY careful the one in your drive
doesn't soften and turn to goo when you're using it.
If you follow the discussions about this over the past few years, a
LOT of HP
software on DC100 tapes has become unrecoverable because of
deterioration of the
rollers and the bands fusing to the tape.
The most important thing right now to get as much data preserved as
can be
recovered. This is why I've been trying to read as many of these
tapes now
as I can before the data I have becomes too expensive and time
consuming to
recover.