Kroll Ontrack achieves industry breakthrough by retrieving data from overwritten LTO-6 tape cartridges

Kroll Ontrack has made a major technical breakthrough by developing a unique toolset that can retrieve overwritten data from LTO-6 tape cartridges – a significant first for the data recovery industry. Overwritten LTO-6 tapes cause major problems for corporates that use them for back-up as the original data on the tape is no longer available and crucial information can be permanently lost.

Kroll Ontrack investigated the challenge of retrieving data from LTO-6 tapes in response to a service provider that had accidentally overwritten data on a client’s back-up tape cartridge. Kroll Ontrack had already developed software and hardware tools to recover data from earlier tape designs (from LTO-1 – LTO-5). However, with LTO-6, originally released in November 2012, some significant changes were made in the design that were incompatible with Kroll Ontrack’s existing LTO tape recovery tools.

Robin England, senior research and development engineer at Kroll Ontrack, explained: “The adoption of LTO-6 tapes is accelerating and we see a regular stream of tapes that have been overwritten, either through administrative or software errors. The challenge with all tape media is that once a new block of data is written at the beginning of a tape that is full, all of the data stored on that tape after the new block becomes inaccessible. So if a tape is accidentally initialised or is even partially overwritten, historically it was not possible to recover the old data.

“In an effort to maximise storage and manufacture faster and more efficient tape design, the specifications of LTO-6 changed fairly significantly from previous versions. In response, Kroll Ontrack made the necessary changes to our tools to make our recovery solution compatible with LTO-6, allowing us to restore data even when it has been accidentally deleted. This recovery capability is available to service providers and corporates from our recovery labs across the world. As far as we are aware, we are the only data recovery company to provide this service for LTO-6 tapes.”

LTO-6 tape services are available as part of Kroll Ontrack’s standard data recovery portfolio. Customers have access to Kroll Ontrack’s state-of-the-art data recovery lab and ISO-5/Class 100 cleanroom environment as well as first-class service and support.