ChannelScience’s goal is to make the best tape readers and cleaners for legacy tape formats possible. We make the tools that professionals in data migration, recovery, preservation, conservation, and archiving use to do their work better, faster, and more economically.
Our products and services eliminate the problems and limitations associated with refurbishing vintage drives for reading tapes, which is the current state-of-the-art.
Open-reel Tape Cleaner
Our first product is a ½” (or smaller) open reel tape cleaner. We are currently testing this at beta sites. The cleaner has wide speed and tension ranges, quick-mounting hubs, a gentle tape path, and an “archival rewind” option. Multiple cleaners can be controlled by one browser-based interface.
It features separate cleaning fabrics for the front and back of the tape and a retractable ceramic burnisher. It has data logging and predictive maintenance features. Our cleaner removes debris and loose oxide particles, reducing head wear and preserving fragile tapes. This extends their lifetime and improves reading consistency.
Create High-resolution Digital Surrogates
Under development is our digital surrogate, or “preservation master,” creator. This creator hardware utilizes our high-resolution, low-noise hardware to capture the most accurate sensing of the magnetic patterns on your tape ever available.
The resolution is near magnetic force microscope (MFM) precision. It also provides unprecedented evaluation of the magnetic state of the tape, including the best-of-class verification that a tape is fully erased.
One purpose of creating such a digital surrogate is “freezing” the magnetic state of the tape as a digital image. This image file is saved to modern media and, with an appropriate data migration policy, it can serve as a detailed reference to the recovered data into the future.
For media that is deteriorating, but for which detection and decoding algorithms are not yet available, the digital surrogate can be used as the source for the eventual recovery – even long into the future.
Multiformat Tape Reader
Our multiformat tape reader is still currently being commercialized. It is based on our patented, four-time DOE SBIR award-winning technology, which is proven to recover data from 9-track digital data tapes.
R&D To Stay at the Leading Edge
ChannelScience was founded for research and development (R&D) of storage and memory technologies. We are committed to continuing to advance and “establish the state-of-the-art” in data recovery.
We are expanding the number of formats our technology can read and decode. We are experimenting with how we can bring our industry-leading capabilities to wider tapes, audio tapes, important video formats, and cartridges.
We are looking for partners and investors to keep our R&D moving forward. We can help you monetize your rare datasets by preparing them for AI/ML training and sovereign AI LLMs.
If you have an interesting pilot project, please tell us about it…