Tape Problems

Are you experiencing the frustration of a restore beginning and then stopping, probably just before it gets to the files you most care about? The backup software might be reporting that a read error has been encountered, almost certainly your tape drive will be sitting there flashing lights and demanding to be cleaned.
Altirium's data recovery experts have more then 20 years experience dealing with such problems. Call us to get your data back.

If your backup tape has been snapped, creased, or it is entangled in the tape drive mechanism, attempting to fix the problem yourself can often lead to more damage and reduce the chance of your vital data being recovered. Our engineers have experience of recovering data from physically damaged tapes that spans 3 decades, and ranges from low cost QIC to high-end Storagetek T10000.

One of the most often seen problems, where data recovery is required, is when a backup tape has been partially overwritten. This can be the result of simply renaming or re-labelling tape media through the backup software, or the software beginning a new backup, just the when a tape was inserted for a restore operation. Altirium have developed data recovery techniques through the use of modified hardware and in-house software to circumvent such problems and recover data that is otherwise inaccessible.

Often the fact that a tape is missing or there is corruption to a backup is only discovered when the need arises to restore files. In most instances the backup software will not restore beyond the corruption, or from any tapes that follow on from the one that is missing. This can lead to the frustrating situation where a large volume of critical data is sitting on tapes that are in perfect working order, but where the data can not be restored.

Altirium software developers have analysed most tape formats, and write software for the purpose of data recovery so are not reliant on using original backup application to recover those vital data files.

Re-initialisation (sometimes known as re-labelling) is a form of overwriting therefore the work to recover data is the same as that for overwritten tapes. Tape re-initialisation involves the writing of a small volume of data to a tape, usually the minimum amount of data required for the backup application to be able to identify the tape.This process leaves most of the original data alone, but you will not be able to get access to it.

Specialist data recovery services such as those provided by Altirium are required for data recovery beyond the overwrite.