Comment by userbinator

As the other comment here says, any company claiming to do data recovery, and damaging the original media to that extent, should be named and shamed. I can believe that DR companies have generic drives and heads to read tapes of any format they come across, but even if they couldn't figure out how the data was encoded, there was absolutely no need to cut and splice the tape. I suspect they did that just out of anger at not likely being able to recover anything (and thus having spent a bunch of time for no profit.)

Melted pinch rollers are not uncommon and there are plenty of other (mostly audio) equipment with similar problems and solutions --- dimensions are not absolutely critical and suitable replacements/substitutes are available.

As an aside, I think that prominent "50 Gigabytes" capacity on the tape cartridge, with a small asterisk-note at the bottom saying "Assumes 2:1 compression", should be outlawed as a deceptive marketing practice. It's a good thing HDD and other storage media didn't go down that route.