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Pim Schellart
Asked: 2011-08-09 13:17:40 +0800 CST

Rescue as much data as possible from damaged tape

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We have some data on very old DDS (1,2 and 3) DAT tapes. I tried reading them with:

dd if=/dev/st0 of=file bs=32k

but get many partial blocks and sometimes IO errors. Have also tried with:

dd if=/dev/st0 of=file bs=32k conv=noerror

which does not stop at partial blocks but does sometimes give IO errors. Some of these tapes contain tar archives but most of them contain a bunch of FITS files. What would be the best way to rescue as much data as possible from these tapes?

linux data-recovery

2 Answers

  1. Send 'em to Kroll Ontrack (or another professional data recovery company). Your restore efforts are much more likely to further damage the tapes than doing anything productive.

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  2. Have a look at ddrescue, which is written for exact this purpose. Depending on the importance of the data, a professional rescue service might be able to do much better, at a (likely very high) price.

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