Securely erasing tapes

[mhoffman]

Hey All...

I am looking for a way to erase our older LTO tapes. Aside from eradicating the tapes with electromagnetic fields, what is the effectiveness of writing meaningless data over the tapes? Can the previous data on the tapes be recovered after the "garbage" is written to the drives? I've heard both ways on this, but nothing concrete.

Thanks in advance!

 

[TekAndy]

I know there are people working on tape "erasers" for the various tape drives. Not sure about LTO. You might be able to write an all "1's" pattern throughout the tape and cover up the previous data. Not sure how effective that is.