On Wed, March 14, 2012 00:26, Nataraj wrote: > I think the reality is that nothing lasts forever. > Optical media is probably much more likely to > survive ICBM's, but then you may not have a drive > to read them... > > Nataraj > About five years ago I was asked to recover data from a 2400' reel mag-tape of unknown provenance in an unknown format. The possessor was a university professor and the tape dated from the late 1970s. It contained data from social science research projects he had conducted at that time. I eventually managed to read the tape at 1600 bpi in raw block format and from the headers determined that the encoding was EBCDIC and that the tape had been created on a CDC machine. However, the entire tape after the headers was blank. Not corrupt, not zeroed, just blank. Apparently the operator had mounted, initialized and labelled an evidently new tape but never actually put any data on it. So the professor had been carefully storing a scratch tape for decades. Always restore from your backups on a regular basis just to ensure there is something there to restore from. -- *** E-Mail is NOT a SECURE channel *** James B. Byrne mailto:ByrneJB at Harte-Lyne.ca Harte & Lyne Limited http://www.harte-lyne.ca 9 Brockley Drive vox: +1 905 561 1241 Hamilton, Ontario fax: +1 905 561 0757 Canada L8E 3C3