Common tape & backup media problems

Kroll Ontrack specialises in tape data recovery including overwtitten tape.

We have developed, both in-house and in conjunction with manufacturers, an unrivalled range of hardware and software tools to deal with almost every situation. If your data is there, we will recover it.

Some of the most common issues we encounter are:

• Damaged tape
• Media error
• Restore fails
• Tape appears to be blank
• Overwritten tape
• Erased tape
• Drive hangs

Tape is a fragile medium and suffers It is not suited to random access operations but provides an effective, high capacity and yet low-cost solution to the problems of securing your data.

Damaged Tape

Snapped or creased: Ontrack can recover any data from undamaged areas of tape, and often even from areas where there is some apparent damage.

Fire or Flood: Any attempt to read the tape will probably result in further damage to both tape and drive. Ontrack has extensive experience of these problems and can prepare your tape so further data loss is prevented and an optimal recovery is achieved.

Fire or extreme heat will cause data loss and might result in a failure of the tape mechanism. Any attempt to read from the tape will fail and might cause the tape to snap or become wound inside the drive mechanism. Our painstaking approach and expertise have recovered data from tapes damaged by even severe fires.

Media Error/Restore fails

Read error/ failure: At Ontrack we will read all unaffected areas of the tape and then, by using our in-house software tools or by writing bespoke code, we will restore the files from your tape.

Tape appears to be blank

Blank tape: Your software tells you that the tape must be formatted or initialised before it can be used. Ontrack's specialised hardware will bypass the problem to recover your data.

Overwritten Tape/Erased Tape

Overwritten data: You have just started a backup and then realised that you are overwriting the only copy of your business-critical data. This becoming one of the most common issues we deal with. Ontrack can access any unaffected area of tape and recover your data.

Drive Hangs

Tracking: You might have a serious media failure or a head alignment problem. Ontrack has an unrivalled range of tools to compensate for the problem and recover your data.

Poor recording: Sometimes a recording flaw can be serious enough to cause the drive firmware to crash and paralyse your entire system. Ontrack's recovery drives are designed to cope with such a situation.

Incomplete recording: A hardware error during writing could have abnormally terminated a backup session. Some backup utilities require access to an on-tape directory that is written once the backup is complete. If the directory is incomplete or corrupt then the software could freeze or fail.