So there is hope for my favorite Dooby Brothers cassette? ;-)
A few years back, I was asked to see if I could get data off of some old 9-track tapes and hooked up an old Cyber SCSI 9-track tape drive to my Sun workstation. I was able to read only the beginning of the tapes and didn't have the equipment to recover the data from those tapes that were in the damaged portions of the tapes.
Finding hardware that's in working order that can read these old tapes and hard drives can be a challenge as well. Most places opt out of keeping that old equipment around to save on service contract costs.
They may not have service contracts on it, but there's probably a storage room around somewhere full of old garbage. A weak manager is unwilling to sign off on discarding old equipment, then his replacement doesn't find out about it, and eventually everyone who ever knew about it is gone, and THEN somebody wonders what the hell's IN that locked room, anyway? And where's the key?