Before I needed it, no one told me that "legacy tape management" was an entire industry.

We inherited roughly 6,000 LTO tapes from a business we bought last year. There was no documentation, no drives that could read half of them, multiple generations and different formats.

spent three weeks attempting to come up with an internal solution before someone recommended outsourcing the entire process. didn't know there were services like that, businesses that specialize in large-scale tape to cloud migration, evaluate what you have, read the formats and transfer everything.