05d Capturing Magnetic Patterns on Legacy Tapes

There is new value in decades-old data, if it can be accessed with modern information technology tools and methods. Some of the data provide snapshots-in-time that cannot be duplicated, such as seismic tests or climate data. The Department of Energy has identified that it, and many other companies and institutions worldwide, have large amounts of data stored on obsolete, legacy, magnetic tapes, many of which are deteriorating. Commercial data recovery and migration services are available, but they are cost-prohibitive when thousands or even tens of thousands of units are to be recovered. In some cases, the tapes cannot leave their current facility because the data may be sensitive. Furthermore, damaged media are unlikely to be recoverable with traditional methods, some tapes may not even survive contact with a magnetic read head. This Phase I project addresses these issues by developing a “universal” non-contact readback system that can be used by the tape repository owners at their facility. It will use much more-sensitive modern tape heads and advanced signal processing to reconstruct a readback signal better than what the original tape drive would have produced, especially in cases of damaged media. In Phase I, the biggest risks for successfully developing this universal, non-contact reader will be surmounted. First, a robust method of maintaining a sub-millimeter separation between head and tape will be developed. Simultaneously, a custom preamp will be designed and built that can read data under a variety of conditions and from a range of head types. Then, the quality of the readback signal, as a function of separation, will be analyzed and optimized. Finally, multiple readback signals per track will be processed into a representation of the data pattern that would be produced by the original equipment. This representation can be passed on to software algorithms that extract the binary data patterns they represent. In Phase II and beyond, these vital technology capabilities will be made more robust, accurate, faster, and cheaper. They will be applied to formats beyond the original target of 1960s to 1980s era 9-track tapes to include higher density cartridge tapes and later popular formats, such as R-DAT. From this foundation, the technology may be developed into a low-cost magnetic microscopy probe, electrical activity sensor (possibly for non-invasive brain studies), metal fracture detection, and DNA analysis.