"Shoe-shining" your data

[Karl Botts]

>Seriously, other than having the oxide rubbed-off down to clear mylar (which I
>*HAVE* seen happen with large auto-loading reel-reel tape drives) when a tape
>section is continually spaced and backspaced over the heads, has anyone:

I once watched from across the room as a colleague took the plastic cover
of the fromt of an HP 9 track unit he had been using to back up some vital
data by streaming it onto a second.  Anyhow, somehow the tape had gotten
threaded a little wrong so it ran over a metal burr, which had stripped the
oxide from most of the width of the tape, end to end.  When he took the
plastic cover off a fine cloud of brown flakes of oxide buried his feet up
to the ankles.  The burr was in front of the read head.  The copy of the
clear mylar (over the previous useful iteration of the data) was
flawless.