“No standard format for writing data to these tapes”
An 11-minute video from MattKC documenting huge effort to revive a backup tape from a 2000 game Frogger 2: Swampy’s Revenge:
This is a pretty harrowing story of restoration, including an extremely obscure backup tape made by a short-lived Dutch company, attempts to reverse engineer a poorly documented data format, a data recovery company that damaged the tape instead of restoring it, and a mad hack to trick the drive into reading it anyway.