The DAT (Digital Audio Tape) originally created by Sony for audio storage, used the DDS (Digital Data Storage) format, jointly defined by Sony and HP, to record data onto this tape cartridge. The DDS-1 DAT tape was the first in a line of tapes introduced, starting with an uncompressed storage capacity of 1.3GB.
The DDS DAT tape has since been recognised as a low cost tape backup media, used for everyday backup solutions. The success and demand of the tape paved the way for the development of higher capacity formats. The 4mm wide tape uses helical scan recording method and is in its sixth generation now using 8mm wide tape in the DAT160, capable of storing 80GB of uncompressed data.
The DDS DAT tape has shown a number of issues that have affected users of this tape media, in one way or another. The most common are media flaws affecting the tape media, resulting in tape read errors. Other issues relate to user errors, where the tape has inadvertently been initialised or re-labelled thereby overwriting the previous data.
Over the years we have perfected our techniques and solutions for recovering data from DDS DAT tapes. We are able to recover DDS DAT tape data whatever the problem:
- Tape media flaws
- Unreadable media
- Snapped tape
- De-spooled tape
- Initialised tape
- Overwritten DAT tape
- Corrupt backup data
- Restore failure
- And others
For a professional DAT tape recovery solution, contact the experts at DiskEng. We can recover your data, whatever the problem you have encountered with your DAT tape.
