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Interesting story, was it a hardware failure that caused the loss, or was it Windows deciding to wipe them? Apologies if I'm missing something obvious disks ar

• Alupis 10y ago
  > was it a hardware failure that caused the loss, or was it Windows deciding to wipe them? No, mechanically they all work fine... just no data on them anymore. I believe the partition table became corrupted, so Windows just thinks its a wiped/new drive and asks if you want to initialize it. In my case, I said "No", and will attempt data recovery sometime when I'm bored (TestDisk[1] might just be able to restore the partition table, allowing me to extract data from the drives then perform a real wipe, otherwise a more serious data recovery tool like StellarPhoenix, GetDataBackNFTS or similar will be required). > disks are also much more succeptible to vibrations than tape They sure are. There are other factors too, such as radiation (from solar flares and more), temperature, and more that can cause "bit rot", even for a drive not in use. > the only thing is that maintaining tape expertise to pull data back into modern systems is a bit difficult Usually not so much. Whatever utility you used to create the backup tape almost assuredly has the ability to restore data from the tape. Some even are full disk images written to tape, which allows you to put a tape drive into a new system and restore the entire thing... while others only backup data to tape, etc. [1] http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk