What is tape drive?

A device, like a tape recorder, that reads data from and writes it onto a tape. Tape drives have data capacities of anywhere from a few hundred kilobytes to several gigabytes. Their transfer speeds also vary considerably. Fast tape drives can transfer as much as 20MB (megabytes) per second.

The disadvantage of tape drives is that they are sequential-access devices, which means that to read any particular block of data, you need to read all the preceding blocks. This makes them much too slow for general-purpose storage operations. However, they are the least expensive media for making backups.

Common problems related to data loss and solutions

• How do I recover deleted file(s) and folder(s)?
• How do I recover missing or lost logical drives?
• How do I recover formatted logical drives?
• How do I recover Fdisked drives?
• How do I recover lost file(s) and folder(s)?
• How do I recover repartitioned (such as Partition Magic resize partition error) drives?
• How do I recover hard disks involving Scandisk and Chkdsk?
• How do I Recover 'Ghosted' (or 'imaged') hard disk drives?
• How do I recover Raw Drive?
• How do I recover Encrypted Data on NTFS Partition?
• How do I recover Compressed Data on NTFS Partition?
• Raid Drive Recovery Overview
• Professional Data Recovery Software: Data Recovery Wizard