Magnetic Tape Deterioration and Data Recovery 1. INTRODUCTION Digital recording of oil and gas exploration data first started over 30 years ago. Since then, vast and ever increasing quantities of data have been generated - a typical 3D seismic survey nowadays is likely to produce many gigabytes of data. Virtually all of the data is recorded on magnetic tape. In the early days this is would have been on 21 track tape, more recently it would have been on 9 track tape or 3480 cartridge, nowadays it is likely to be on 3490E or 3590 tape cartridge. Oil exploration data is generally kept for many years, if not indefinitely. Worldwide therefore a vast quantity of data is held on magnetic tape or cartridge. Magnetic tape is not a particularly stable medium, and many tapes recorded a few or more years ago are now showing signs of deterioration, a condition commonly referred to as "stiction". The first problem facing a company whose data archive may have stiction problems is to identify the particular tapes where the problems have occurred. A data audit of a statistically representative sample of the archive is a reliable and relatively cheap method of achieving this. Once the problem tapes have been identified, recovering data from them requires specialized equipment and procedures. If these procedures are followed a high data recovery success rate can be achieved. However, attempts to read deteriorating tapes on standard tape drives with standard methods can result in serious damage to the tape and data can be lost irrecoverably. Table of Contents INTRODUCTION TAPE MANUFACTURING PROCESS TAPE DETERIORATION DATA AUDIT DATA RECOVERY SUMMARY See other technical papers.