DLT Tape Recovery
The native recording format for a DLT tape media is the standard "serpentine recording format". Where data is recorded along a sequence of track pairs, each running alternately from the start of the DLT tape to the end of the DLT tape and then repeating the whole process back again. Through the years we have retrieved data from this type of format and from all variants of DLT tape media, including; DLT II, DLT III, DLTIV, DLT7000, DLT8000, SDLT, Super DLT and others.
Serpentine Recording Format

DLT Recovery Capabilities
Consider what would happen if your company RAID server failed and you needed to restore data from your DLT tape backup or you need to access archive data recorded some time ago but now realise the tape is corrupt, unreadable or simply fails to restore?. You may be faced with a real business continuity crises. We have dealt with many such situations working with IT system managers and recovered the data quickly and efficiently.
We have recovered data for companies across many different sectors utilising DLT tape storage. Recovering data from DLT tapes containing file backup, differential backup, exchange backup and more. These DLT tapes failed due to a variety of causes. Although most of these were due to user errors, where the DLT tapes had been accidentally initialised or overwritten but in other cases due to bad blocks affecting reference tracks, data tracks, initialisation blocks and EOD (End of Data) block resulting in data corruption and failure to restore tape backup.
Some of the more serious problems were due to failure of the DLT tape drive itself, failure to unload the tape, causing physical damage and tapes that had despooled into a pile of mess literally! and in some cases actually snapped and required " splicing " of the broken tape in our tape recovery laboratory. The worst case of DLT tape damage we have recently recovered data from are boxes of flood damaged DLT tapes, which required hours of bespoke cleaning and re-surfacing work, before data blocks could be read and the data files extracted.
At DiskEng we have you covered. We can handle all these types of failures including unreadable DLT tapes and tapes which have encountered data corruption, catalogue errors, data read errors and media flaws and more. We can bypass internal data corruption and access raw data on the tape and extract data files directly from the raw data and return the recovered files on DVD disk or a new DLT tape. If you encounter a problem with your DLT tapes and need the data recovered fast, contact DiskEng immediately for guaranteed tape data recovery.