Hacker News Reader

IME the bigger problem is the tape reader failing and the replacement not being able to read the old tapes...

You can grab virtually any old type of old tape reader over on ebay. As long as the host system has drivers for it (IIRC even 8 years ago there were no mainline drivers for Iomega ZIP floppies), you'll be fine.

And for really crucial data, you can always go to a data lab and have them restore the tape; wasn't there a story a year ago or so when they found old NASA tapes?

A standard tape horror story is that the old drive ended up out of alignment and later died, then the replacement, same type, was aligned properly (or just differently) and couldn't read the existing tapes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com