From: "Michael S. Lorrey" <mike@datamann.com>
>Keep in mind that if his 'life's work' was on tapes that had been
>written years ago, on tapes that are a few decades old, there is
>a distinct chance of losing a good chunk of data in many places.
>Some tapes of the older and lower quality types (esp dealing with
>9 track), are extremely hard to recover data off of after
>storage for many years even under the best of conditions. I'm
>experienced dealing with poor quality tapes, some of which are
>older than I am, and its no picnic. If the winding of the tape
>loosened at all, water would have seeped in between the tape
>material rather easily.
>It can be done, but it is expensive.
Mike's point is a good one. Any magnetically recorded item starts
to degrade almost from the moment it's created and will need to be
re-recorded periodically depending on the levels it was recorded at
(key word hysteresis). Some formats are more notorious for this
than others. A box of even regular 3.5 floppys kept under perfect
conditions will degrade to useless over time. I forget the
technical name for this.
Contacting the tapes manufacturer should provide appropriate data
on this.
Brian
Member:
Extropy Institute, www.extropy.org
Adler Planetarium www.adlerplanetarium.org
Life Extension Foundation, www.lef.org
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Mars Society, www.marssociety.org
Ameritech Data Center Chicago, IL, Local 134 I.B.E.W
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