drive is not cleaned regularly, however, up to 4 cleaning cycles may be necessary to fully clean the drive.
Compaq recommends a routine cleaning schedule every 100 hours of use. In addition, the drive should be cleaned whenever the front panel LCD indicates.
Not all tape drives require the same frequency of cleaning to keep them operating efficiently. Factors such as the design of the tape drive and the quality of the tape media used for backups affect cleaning frequency.
Errors Resulting from
Cleaning Neglect
Following are some of the errors that can result from failure to observe routine maintenance and cleaning of tape drives:
■Dropouts — Caused by weak signal strength from dirty read/write heads, a dropout can result in reduced tape capacity and backup performance.
■Media errors — The backup tapes can be jammed, torn, or otherwise damaged by a dirty read/write head.
■Read or write errors — Because of a dirty read/write head, data may not have been recorded on the tape during backup. Even if the data is on the backup tape, retrieval may not be possible if the dirty head cannot read the data.
■Format failures — During backup, data is laid on the tape in a certain format for easy retrieval. A dirty write head can cause format failures, which means that data can be lost or impossible to retrieve.
■Bad blocks — Because of media damage (see Media errors above), the tape may not accept backup data. Also, the read/write head may be unable to retrieve data from bad blocks.