Going Tapeless and Saving All Your Content While You Can
Many of the tapes we've been loading have been 10 to 15 years old. The really good news is the tape is in great shape. We've not noticed any additional drop outs or other tape based problems despite their age. I know we all worry about how well tape will hold up and the answer is Beta SP seems to store and hold up very well. This has to do with the fact its a metal based instead of oxide tape, and its just made better then older generations of tape. Its got better binders, better base and only one tape type. Well almost one tape type since there was the non SP version of the format. We've had a few of those and they as well have run just fine. Certainly its been better then some 25+ year old 3/4 tapes I have which are simply shedding like crazy, causing frequent head clogs and signs of print through. Print through is when the magnetic charge of particles of one layer of tape start to change the charges of particlesin layers of tape next to them. Those tapes can often be play once situations so you better get it as it goes by.
The bad news is Beta SP tape machines. UVW series machines which are the most common ones out there all suffer from a design defect in their reel motors. It doesn't matter if they have only a few hundred or a few thousand hours on them. The reel motors all seem to fail due to this defect based on age. The problem is the cost of repair can be more then the machine is worth in today's market for used machines. This means keeping these machines running is now a big problem. For a while, its simpler and cheaper to just buy another used machine that works. However, its also obvious that with these machines all pretty much expected to fail with age sooner then you'd expect, even the used market will dry up as far as being able to get a functioning machine. Even if you do get a used working machine, there is no guarantee how long it will work. Eventually you'll be forced to either abandon any thoughts of getting at the content of the tapes, paying a lot of money to repair a machine to work again, or to find some one else who has a functioning machine to load what you hope is the right tape.
