DLT has been at the forefront of tape backup for all types of system for well over a decade. Altirium have developed DLT data recovery techniques for recovery from DLT and SDLT (DLT-V and DLT-S) data cartridges.

The types of problem where DLT recovery has been needed include physical problems (stretching, creasing, tearing, heat damage), recording issues (failing write heads and corruption to the data at the start of the tape), and the recovery of data following overwriting or media flaws.

AIT is a helical scan medium, as are DAT, VXA and Exabyte. As with other helical scan formats the most common problems involve failures within the drive mechanism when the tape is loaded resulting in creasing, stretching or snapping of the media, or mis-recording the data on the tape.

Logical problems relating to overwriting, data corruption and externally caused damage from fire, smoke or water have also been successfully dealt with.

DAT came to the fore in the 1990s across the whole range of computer systems and platforms. The majority of problems during this time have related to tracking, where failing equipment has mis-recorded data on to the tape, and human factors such as the accidental re-initialising of tapes or the overuse of media resulting in tape becoming unreadable due to wear and tear.

DAT is still a popular format, though the latest version has moved from 4mm tape up to 8mm to keep up with the capacity requirements of its market space.

Exabyte 8mm cartridges became a leading backup format for mid-range systems (AS/400, UNIX and VAX) from the late 1980s as they provided a massive increase in data capacity over any other technology commonly available at that time. It also gained reasonably wide acceptance for higher end server backup.

The format lives on in VXA, Exabyte itself now being owned by Tandberg.