Media
today.
Knowledge
tomorrow.
EOF Labs is a visual and technical archive of storage media: how formats were built, which machines wrote them, how they age, and what is required to make their contents readable again.
We treat the carrier, the drive, the interface and the data format as one preservation problem. A tape, disk or cartridge is only useful if the entire chain needed to interpret it can still be reconstructed.
Explore the collection →
From early open-reel systems to current archival cartridges.
Reels, cassettes, cartridges, removable disks and specialist branches.
Magnetic and optical, with the hardware ecosystems around them.
Recover the medium first. Then determine what the bytes mean.
Magnetic tape
Open reels, compact cassettes, data cassettes and cartridges. The physical shell is only the beginning: track geometry, tape chemistry, servo information and recording method determine which drive can read it.
Enterprise tape
IBM, StorageTek, DLT, LTO and the library ecosystems built around them. Enterprise media adds another layer of dependency: compatible drives, robotics, firmware, interfaces and often backup software.
Optical & magneto-optical
CD, DVD, Blu-ray, MO, MiniDisc, WORM and UDO. Similar-looking discs can rely on very different recording layers, sector formats, error correction and drive generations.
The medium is part of the evidence.
Each format is documented as a physical object and as part of a technical system: date, dimensions, capacity, recording method, media chemistry, compatible drives, interfaces, software dependencies, failure modes and practical recovery routes.
The aim is not only to identify an object on a shelf. It is to preserve enough context to reproduce the chain that once made the object useful. That means recording what wrote it, what can still read it, what adapters or controllers are needed, and where interpretation moves from hardware into software archaeology.
Recover the medium first. Then the data.
A readable cartridge may still contain an unreadable backup. The medium determines the drive; the drive determines the interface; the interface determines which host systems and software can participate in the recovery.
Only after a stable physical read exists do we work out what the bytes actually represent. EOF Labs therefore separates preservation from interpretation: first make a faithful image of the surviving medium, then decode file systems, backup formats, databases or application-specific structures without repeatedly stressing the original carrier.
The broader principle is simple: make knowledge survive across time, formats, failures and people by preserving not just the bits, but the context required to understand them.