On Wed, March 14, 2012 00:26, Nataraj wrote:
> I think the reality is that nothing lasts forever.
> Optical media is probably much more likely to
> survive ICBM's, but then you may not have a drive
> to read them...
>
> Nataraj
>
About five years ago I was asked to recover data from a
2400' reel mag-tape of unknown provenance in an unknown
format. The possessor was a university professor and the
tape dated from the late 1970s. It contained data from
social science research projects he had conducted at that
time.
I eventually managed to read the tape at 1600 bpi in raw
block format and from the headers determined that the
encoding was EBCDIC and that the tape had been created on
a CDC machine. However, the entire tape after the headers
was blank. Not corrupt, not zeroed, just blank.
Apparently the operator had mounted, initialized and
labelled an evidently new tape but never actually put any
data on it.
So the professor had been carefully storing a scratch tape
for decades.
Always restore from your backups on a regular basis just
to ensure there is something there to restore from.
--
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