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DLT tape recovery - can data be recovered after an overwrite?
Posted by Mark on Nov 21, 2008
Interesting data recovery job this one, most especially as it had been sent to three other companies in continental Europe before it found its way across the moat to dear old blighty.
The data on this tape was an Amanda backup from a Sun UNIX system, in the region of 80GB had been written to an SDLTII data cartridge for safekeeping, but no-one had set the tape to write protect. Consequently, when one of the IT staff went to recover some data from the tape, something went wrong and the DLT was re-initialised. From being a vital system backup brimming with data ready to be accessed, the DLT was just another scratch tape waiting to be used. Needless to say the accounts department who needed the data were non-too happy when their data could no longer be restore.