How to recover overwritten/erased footage on Digital 8 cassettes?

[Hassaan17]

I have several Digital 8 cassettes at home with old home videos on them. However, I have accidentally recorded over some footage, and presumably other footage has been over-written previously. I am trying to look for mediums to recover this footage. I am looking for a service (within the UK) that maybe does this, but I hope it is somehow possible. I know it is considered near impossible as it's a linear tape and different to a hard drive but I do hope there is a method available.

I hope posters on this forum can help with my request.

 

[kenrivers]

Not sure it is possible. Explanation: http/www.digitalfaq.com/forum/video-restore/4160-video-recovery-vs.html

 

[Hassaan17]

Not sure it is possible. Explanation: http/www.digitalfaq.com/forum/video-restore/4160-video-recovery-vs.html

I can see that it could be seen as nearly impossible. I'm still holding my breath for a potentially working method though.

 

[hang-the-9]

If you have enough money to spend I'm sure some place will be able to send enough tech and time at it to get you some video back. I would say it would be in the range of many thousands of dollars and a seutp like what a university or bit lab may have. Basically they would have to stick the tape under a microsocope or magnetic reader and look at the bits one at a time to sort out what belonged to the old info and what belonged to the new one.

If the data is worth the price of a house to you, you may have a chance, contact IBM or a nearby university and see what they can do.

You also said that the tape was re-used several times, which makes it that much harder.
Like finding a drop of red paint that you put in a lake and try to find out where the red pigment is at after a month of rain, evaporation, more rain, etc... In theory it's possible, but who is going to filter all the drops of water under a microscope to find some red?

When we say "nearly impossible" we don't mean "it's a bit hard". Closing your eyes and running across 10 lanes of rush hour traffic while balancing an egg on your nose is "a bit hard" in comparison to what it would take to recover a video over-written by something.

Not only does someone have to generate a single image of the original one that was overwritten which is hard enough, you want a VIDEO recovered after multiple over-writes.