27 Nov
2021
27 Nov
'21
12:47 a.m.
I haven't done anything with 9 track tapes for a long time, but I used
to help my father with his statistical research, processing what at the
time seemed massive census and similar data sets on 9 track tape (using
PL/I on 370s at U. MO Columbia). Some of his tapes were quite old,
stored in his basement and then his garage, but I don't recall problems
reading any of them.
IMNSHO, it all depends on the brand/formulation of the tape. I've been
going through old audio tapes and digitizing them
(https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2021/08/21/making-private-1960s-and-7…).
Some are over 50 years old and still seem as good to me as when they
were recorded. Others, I can anticipate from the brand/formulation that
they are going to be trouble, if salvageable at all. Most surprisingly,
unbranded and similar budget tapes have survived as well or better than
some of the high-priced stuff. A few days ago I tried a reel from 1968.
I was dismayed by how many times it had been spliced, but replace the
splicing tape and found it viable.
I have dozens of DDS-2, 3 & 4 cartridges from the 90s that I
occasionally try to read. I don't recall any of them failing.
(We probably should be COFFing this up.)
Charlie
On 11/26/2021 6:30 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
On Fri, Nov 26, 2021 at 07:23:07PM -0500, Dennis Boone
wrote:
Contrast that with the write only exabyte tapes. I lost some stuff to those.
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In my
experience 9 track tapes were not guaranteed to be readable after
some interval. In fact, a standard operations procedure was to copy
important tapes to new media periodically.
There are always ways in which your backups can go wrong and not be
readable, and I'm not arguing that here.
But 9 track tapes have turned out to be pretty spectacularly long-lived.
I've personally read tapes that were stored for 30+ years in
unconditioned spaces.