A couple decades ago, I used to keep backups of my desktop computer on DAT tapes. I had several different tape cassettes that I rotated through to keep many se

A couple decades ago, I used to keep backups of my desktop computer on DAT tapes. I had several different tape cassettes that I rotated through to keep many separate backups of all my data, and I thought of them as different devices until the day when I ejected one of the DAT tapes from the drive and it came out trailing a couple meters of unwound tape, with a small (but apparently important) spring hanging off the end. Lesson learned! I now still had several intact tape backups of my data, but no functional device that could read and restore from them.