To begin with, tape had a pretty sad scenario. The ancient analogue versions were going out of use and their large, noisy, clumsy players filled the waste recycling plants. Digital tape changed it all, though. And miraculously enough, the magnetic tape made a comeback as it became compatible with digital devices and was used widely for industrial data storage and the audio visual industry.
Today, there are magnetic tapes available that offer great reproduction quality, are well-packaged, last longer, have wider format acceptance and can run on a host of digital drives. The greatest advantage of tape had been its pricing and this factor alone became its winning streak. The market is flooded today with recycled magnetic tapes; they are being sold online, even put on auctions for incredibly low prices. But is the picture entirely sunny, or are there some problems as well? Several corporate houses have moved platform from magnetic tape to online backups and arrays so there must be some snags as well. These are the factors being discussed in the following.
Advantages of Recycled Magnetic Tape
The advantages of using recycled media, in general, are much the same, but they have been noted here in the context of the magnetic tape.
The greatest point in favour of recycled magnetic tape is cost. We need to keep in mind that magnetic tape is hardly the kind of format a home user would be accessing everyday. It is essentially for industrial use. A corporate house would be thinking in terms of saving hundreds or maybe even millions of pounds through its choice of backup media. It would be buying magnetic tape en masse and would avail a greater discount through this.
Cost cutting, in industrial terms, does not mean only saving the amount that would be spent in buying the gadget itself. It also means saving on the massive infrastructure backup that is required to run the devices. Magnetic tape does not need high-end drives or state-of-the-art systems. The minimalist equipment required for it would also mean that less people are required on payroll to maintain the equipment.
New generations of technology can create major problems in the context of industrial data backup. There is a newer, prettier and faster format every six months when it comes to software development. Recycled magnetic tapes may be old, ugly and slow, but they will never change, and that means one need not keep pace with every shift in the market. Problems of OS incompatibility or motherboard types not matching will not create a ruckus as it does in the case of hard disks or other digital devices. Magnetic tape is stable and, therefore, safe.
Recycling is a good habit if we wish to spare thought about the environment. The vast toxic waste generated by the digital industry is a concern no one likes to voice, but recycled magnetic tape is comparatively a greener idea. The advantage is that it comes at a lower cost, unlike the usual pricey method of showing our concern for planet earth.
Problems of Recycled Magnetic Tapes
Now we need to look at the darker side of recycled magnetic tapes.
Do you want to sell your old tapes? How do you know whether all of them have been cleaned adequately? Imagine your rival coming across your data from a discarded old tape and gloating over it while you remain blissfully unaware.
Are you a buyer of recycled magnetic tape? The packaging is nice, the plastic casing shines, but perhaps the tape is really corrupt, dusty and flaky under all that jazz. You get to discover this long after you have bought it, when you see your data mixed up in a terrible garble with old data that was lying there on the unclean tape you just ran. Dirty tapes will jam the head of the player, they will flake all over the place, and you will be stuck with truckloads of useless tape.
You will have to hire people to maintain, dust, clean, label and monitor the whole process. Magnetic tapes have to be manually managed and scratches can be potential killers. So you do end up spending quite a bit even if you have saved the costs initially.
Finally, if you lose data from magnetic tapes, you have no one to blame except yourself.
