Yes. Even if the tapes had not been erased, it would have been difficult if not impossible to get it back after that amount of time.<p>About 5 years ago I helped a team migrate a bunch of data from ~30 year old 9-track tape reels.  Obtaining and restoring hardware that was even capable of reading the reels was hard enough (we are talking spending thousands of dollars purchasing zero-warranty equipment from sketchy places on the &#x27;net that had a few sitting in some dusty corner of their warehouse).<p>We also had to write our own software to read the tapes until an error occurred; reset the drive, retry reading from that spot again, and so on, and then concatenate all of the chucks together.<p>Most of the reels were eventually readable this way, but there still ended up being a not insignificant number that were given up on after several failed attempts.