Or some other way of erasing a bulk bunch of DLT tapes or Travan tapes that I’m selling on eBay? All the tapes’ data was encrypted on the tapes, but I’d still like to erase them to avoid trouble. Both the drives that used those tapes are toast, so I can’t erase them that way. Anybody know any good way to get rid of the data on them?
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Well, I would personally write blank data to each of the disks in turn.
I mean for reals: you’ll never know if the magnet worked unless you check the tapes, which would take as long.
My friend in high school got mad at me and swung a magnet over all of my floppy disks at one point. For some reason all of the PC-formatted disks were toast, but the Mac-formatted ones survived. So either sell the tapes with encrypted data and be done with it, or write blank data to all of the tapes and sleep at night. 🙂
I have a powered magnet for just such a purpose. You may be able to pick one up @ a video supply store (usually used for erasing Beta tapes for reuse).
Jesse: I would love to write blank data to the tapes, but, as I said in the post, my drives are toast, so I can’t do that unless somebody has a DLT tape drive they can loan me.
Ironically enough, a Google ad appeared at the end of this blog post that took me to a possible solution.