Need help recovering data from LTO Tape

Recovering data from an LTO-7 tape with bad blocks is difficult because tape drives usually stop when they hit unreadable sections. You can try using ddrescue on /dev/nst0, but success depends on the drive firmware, which may not allow skipping bad blocks. A practical method is to use mt commands (fsf, bsf, eom) to move past the error and reattempt reads with dd in smaller block sizes to recover as much data as possible around the damaged section. Commercial tools such as Stellar or Ontrack are built for this purpose and often handle bad spots more effectively. The recovery process also depends on how the tape was originally written—whether LTFS, tar, or backup software like NetBackup—since this affects how usable the recovered data will be. If the tape consistently fails at the same point even on different drives, and the data is important, professional tape recovery services are the most reliable option.