Your Archives Are Sleeping on Dying Tapes: When and How to Migrate Your Old Backups
A well-stored magnetic tape preserves its data for decades: it is almost never the medium that dies, but everything you need to read it again. This article explains why a perfectly readable LTO, DLT or DAT archive can become inaccessible, and how to migrate before it is too late. You will discover the two major obstacles: finding a compatible and functional drive (the LTO compatibility rule, the headache of SCSI and SAS connectivity), then facing the software wall of the format and the backup catalog, without which you do not know what the tape contains. Through a real case where recovering a Retrospect backup meant digging out an old Mac, you will understand why the right benchmark is around fifteen years, prioritizing regulated data, patents and irreplaceable archives. Finally, the step-by-step course of a professional extraction.