{"id":372142,"date":"2026-07-12T10:16:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-12T17:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/?p=372142"},"modified":"2026-07-12T10:16:06","modified_gmt":"2026-07-12T17:16:06","slug":"sony-dat-the-failed-cassette-successor-that-powered-1990s-backups","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/sony-dat-the-failed-cassette-successor-that-powered-1990s-backups\/","title":{"rendered":"Sony DAT: the failed cassette successor that powered 1990s backups"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sony launched Digital Audio Tape, or DAT, in <strong>1987<\/strong>. It was supposed to be the digital heir to the compact cassette, offering CD-quality recording in a small, portable shell that looked like it might change the way people recorded music.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It sounded like the future on paper, but consumers never really embraced it. DAT machines were expensive, and record labels pushed copy controls like the Serial Copy Management System (SCMS). <strong>Professional audio went<\/strong> a different way. Studios and field recordists adopted DAT for its clarity and portability, even with the fragile helical-scan mechanism and the fact that tapes recorded on one machine didn&#8217;t always play back cleanly on another.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">DAT ended up mattering much more in another role, when the same tape technology was turned into <strong>Digital Data Storage<\/strong> (DDS). That gave IT departments a compact backup format that started at roughly 2GB uncompressed and grew to 20GB by DDS-4 at the end of the 1990s.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The cartridges were small, easy to carry off-site, and well suited to disaster recovery. For a lot of IT teams, DAT became a familiar, fairly affordable backup workhorse before growing data volumes pushed companies toward Digital Linear Tape (DLT) and later Linear Tape-Open (LTO).<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When people talk about forgotten formats, DAT is easier to remember for the server backups it quietly handled than for the music revolution it never pulled off.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sony ended DAT hardware in <strong>2005<\/strong>, but the format&#8217;s legacy is still easy to spot in tape systems like LTO, where air-gapped storage still has real value against ransomware.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sony launched Digital Audio Tape, or DAT, in 1987. It was supposed to be the digital heir to the compact cassette, offering CD-quality recording in a small, portable shell that looked like it might change the way people recorded music. It sounded like the future on paper, but consumers never really embraced it. DAT machines &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/sony-dat-the-failed-cassette-successor-that-powered-1990s-backups\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Sony DAT: the failed cassette successor that powered 1990s backups&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9328,"featured_media":372141,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","wpcf-pageviews":0},"categories":[1015],"tags":[],"usertag":[],"vertical":[],"content-category":[],"class_list":["post-372142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9328"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=372142"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":372143,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372142\/revisions\/372143"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/372141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=372142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=372142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=372142"},{"taxonomy":"usertag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/usertag?post=372142"},{"taxonomy":"vertical","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/vertical?post=372142"},{"taxonomy":"content-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/content-category?post=372142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}