This 2025 holiday season, on our LinkedIn feed, we’ve featured 12 legacy storage formats where irreplaceable data is increasingly at risk. As materials age, equipment disappears, and specialist knowledge becomes harder to find, organizations need to act before valuable information is lost forever.
Starting with lower-risk formats and finishing with those in critical danger, here’s our list!
Still Readable – Just!
We started with CDs. First introduced in the 1980s, they became the default for storing and sharing digital information. Many will recall the frustration of scratched discs, but disk rot and dye degradation are now the bigger threats to this once “indestructible” format.
Aperture cards, microfilm, and microfiche followed in our list of festive formats. These analogue media were the backbone of information management from the 1850s through to the 1990s, preserving everything from architectural blueprints to newspaper archives. The British Library still holds extensive collections on microfilm. But reading equipment is disappearing rapidly, and all three of these formats are vulnerable to heat, humidity, and chemical degradation.
The Tapes
Early-generation LTO tapes came next in our log. Although LTO remains actively developed, the first generations launched in 2000 are nearing the end of their lifespan. Studios, scientists, and energy companies used them to archive everything from film masters to climate models – data that could be locked away permanently without timely recovery.
DLT and SDLT cartridges were the backup workhorses of the 1980s and 90s, essential across scientific research, corporate IT, and media production. Some organizations still rely on these as their only “known good copy” of important records.
8mm data cassettes, popular as businesses went digital in the late 80s and 90s, are now firmly on the at-risk list. They are rare, fragile, and increasingly difficult to recover.
Critical Risk – The Mainframe Era
3480 and 3490 cartridges were mainframe staples, holding operational records for banks, governments, and global corporations. With failing media and almost no usable drives left, few companies can access their contents.
9-track open-reel tape, one of the earliest widely adopted digital formats, supported mainframes from the 1960s to the 80s and became standard for seismic data and well logs. For many vintage surveys, the only surviving copy may sit on these tapes.
The Rarest Formats
Our final three formats are the most vulnerable. 21-track and 14-track reels were experimental attempts to increase capacity that never achieved wide adoption. They captured unique datasets, but with almost no machines left to read them, they’re at extreme risk of becoming permanently inaccessible.
And the most vulnerable of our list? 7-track reels. One of the very first digital reel-to-reel formats, 7-tracks supported commercial computing in the 1950s and 60s and are likely to hold some of the earliest data records in existence. Created before standards existed, they vary between manufacturers, making recovery complex.
Don’t Let Your Irreplaceable Data Become Inaccessible
If any of these formats turn up in your archive, don’t assume the data is gone. At Ovation Data, our specialists work with legacy media every day, with the tools, expertise, and care needed to recover irreplaceable information before it’s lost for good.
Whether you’ve found unmarked tapes in storage or you’re managing a known archive of legacy formats, we can help you understand what you have and bring it back into use.
Explore the full range of formats we work with, or get in touch to discuss your recovery needs.
