Tape Data Recovery Services

Tape data recovery, including all types and size of tape and operating systems.  

When you need it most, it doesn't work. Backups are an important part of business IT operations however sometimes it's found that the backup has failed, or the tape is no longer allowing access to the data stored on it.

We can recover data from all common tape drive formats

• DAT
• DDS
• DLT
• SDLT
• AIT
• ADR
• LTO
• SDLT
• Ultrium
• Travan
• QIC

• Windows Backup
• VERITAS (or Norton) Backup EXEC
• Brightstor Arcserve
• Iomega Backup
• Seagate backup

Tape data recovery problems

We can recover data stored on tape when the backup software no longer recognises the tape or backup set stored on it, from damaged, 'sticky' or broken tapes, from tapes where some of the data has been overwritten, chewed up tapes and tapes with de-oxidised corruption.

Our tape data recovery process

• The first stage in the tape data recovery process is to carefully take an image of the tape and store it as a file or a group of files. Some of these images can be several hundred giga bytes and even into the terabyte region so a lot of storage space is required. Currently we use a dedicated 8 Terabyte storage system for tape data recovery, but we can go way beyond this when necessary.
• The next stage is to pull the files out of the image. Different backup software manufacturers use different techniques to store data on tape which can also vary between software versions. This is why the ability to write our own software enables us to set parameters according to the actual data found on the tape in order to extract the critical files.

At this point we are in a situation where we have extracted as much data as possible from the old media.

Selective tape data recovery

In order to speed up the data recovery process, we can selectively search the image for specific files or folders. As many backup systems use incremental backups, there may be several copies of the data within a single image file, so we can copy off only the latest data, or we can recover the whole image and store on external hard disks and let you, be selective when you get the data back.

We have our own tape data recovery software

We have developed our own software for tape and backup recovery, so we are able to adjust the parameters according to the data we find on the tape.

Windows .bkf data recovery