Many companies have historical archives on LTO, DLT, or DAT tapes. The problem arises years later when they need to read them and no longer have the drive, or the tape has degraded due to moisture.
Tape recovery involves chemical cleaning of the magnetic tape, repair of traction mechanisms, and reading with legacy hardware specifically maintained for this purpose. The original backup software (Veritas, Arcserve, Tar) is also required to interpret the sequential data structure.
