When Regal Petroleum wanted to revisit seismic surveys recorded on half inch Fujitsu tape in the Ukraine over 15 years ago, they were faced with a common problem - sticktion!
Old tape often becomes sticky, shedding oxide at an alarming rate and this sticktion soon causes loss of quality, screeching and even slowing down if not attended to. It is related to moisture in the atmosphere, which infiltrates the laminate of the tape and effects the lubricant - thus the tape has a tendancy to "stick" causing creasing or even tearing when passing over the read/write heads.
Regal found that sticktion had effected the majority of their tapes recorded in the 1980s. We find that mass-produced tapes of this era are far less reliable than the older tapes from the 1970s, where the quality is more pronounced because less were produced. In order to overcome the problem, we first had to drive out the moisture by curing the tapes in a purpose built oven for 72 hours. Thereafter, the tapes have to be re-lubricated and relaminated, before attempting a read on a propriatory tape drive that we have specifically built to avoid sticktion on the heads. Although the complete project took almost one month to complete, not one single byte of data was lost!