An initial diagnosis is performed on the tape media to ascertain if it is operable and accessible with our lab equipment. If the media is inaccessible, we will test the cartridge components to determine the extent of physical damage.
Recovery of damaged tape media often involves cleaning, splicing & respooling healthy segments of tape into new carriers using specialized tools. Specially configured tape drives using customized hardware and software tools are used to create a raw image from whatever portions of tape those are readable.
Logical recovery uses the raw image by examining the low-level data sectors and determining what fixes to tape format structures are needed to get access to the important data. Sometimes the existing structures are missing or damaged so much that data has to be extracted directly from the raw image.
Our Tape Data Recovery programmers have created a full set of software tools used by our technicians to analyze, fix & recover data from raw tape images. Once a recovery has been successfully performed, file lists are created and data validity is checked.