Bulk tape eraser

[Zane Healy]

On Apr 30, 2017, at 10:04 AM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> On 04/30/2017 08:55 AM, Al Kossow via cctalk wrote:
>> You may as well run them through a shredder. All modern tapes have
>> embedded servo tracks.
> 
> Certainly not DLT IV tapes--I've done the bulk eraser thing with them
> and the result re-recorded just fine.
> 
> But then, DLT IV is hardly modern.
> 
> --Chuck

I know you can’t run LTO tapes through one, but if I remember correctly you can do at least the original SDLT tapes.  We had a heavy duty degausser in the datacenter, up until a couple years ago.  The tape library vendor we were using at the time wanted us to degauss tapes prior to reusing them due to all the issues we were having.  That meant degaussing 100’s of tapes a week.  Normally contractors would do it, but in an emergency, I’d do it at times.  With the later tapes, you had to run them through something like 4 different ways, otherwise they were still readable (which is why I’m pretty sure we were degaussing SDLT tapes).  As I recall, DLT IV tapes only had to go through once.

Zane