Some things, like sneezes, just seem to come in threes. Last week I got the third call in the past year asking for help restoring an oddball tape. In each case, a midsize company tried to satisfy its data-retention policy by putting end-of-month backup tapes on the shelf just in case the data on them would be needed in the future. Then when that time came, each was missing a tape drive or application to read them.

In the simplest case, my client had a records management company pick up tapes every Monday for off-site backups and never recalled the first box each month. Then someone from legal started asking about files from an employee who had been fired in 2004. Back come the boxes and inside are both DLT7000 tapes and a few DDS-2 DATs. While they no longer had a DAT drive, CDW was glad to sell them one and Backup Exec 11D could read a Backup Exec 8 tape.

Then a university police officer came in with an 8mm tape. Label on the tape just said "backup of 10.14.01" -- apparently someone took the tape and stuck it in an envelope that was part of a case that was coming to trial. No one makes 8mm tape drives anymore, but universities being what they are, a department had one on an old AIX system. The drive accepted the tape OK, but it took me three days of trial and error to find and application that could read it.

In the third case, a client decided to clean out the media safe and found about 100 OnStream ADR tapes. When they called, I let them know that OnStream went out of business in 2003, that the reason it went out of business was the product wasn't very reliable. I did find a Dutch company (OnStream was a Phillips spin-off) that has some drives and tapes available. Luckily, the client's legal counsel told them they could shred the tapes so we didn't have to play backup application bingo again. If you have OnStream issues, try http://www.hastec.nl/ .

So what lessons can we learn?