Originally Posted by
SirFlysALot
During an earlier point in my career, I performed software installations. After a few incidents where the tape would not load at the client side, I would always ask for a manual inspection at the checkpoint. About 50% of the time I would get push back (pre TSA days) where they told me it was perfectly safe.
I started asking the screeners to run the tape through the x-ray several times on the way back after the successful installation. It was just an experiment. Many times the tape would not work back in the office where I would also get the same parity errors I would previously get on site.
These tapes were low density and media today is much higher density. I would expect that the same results might be found on computer equipment. Some sites were always fine but others would damage the tape repeatedly. Some x-ray machines must have been really cranked.
I'm not an expert, but I've always been told that x-rays don't, in and of themselves, disrupt magnetic storage media, particularly at the low exposure levels used in carry-on baggage scanners (which are limited in their power levels due to unshielded human proximity).
However, an x-ray machine is obviously an electrical device. I don't know how they generate, or detect, the x-rays they use to form the image, so a large electromagnet could be part of the process, and the magnetic field from that may be what disrupted your tapes.
I've passed magnetic media through the carry-on x-ray scanner a few times - floppy disks, various VHS tapes, and of course the hard drive of my laptops - without incident, but I did once have a shipment of floppies scrambled like a dozen eggs when they were shipped to me via FedEx. I always suspected that Fed-Ex had x-rayed the box in transit, but never could be sure. Whatever happened, the disks' FATs were scrambled and the computer wouldn't even recognize them as formatted media; after formatting, they seemed usable, though of course I tossed them out as untrustworthy anyway. Out of an abundance of caution, as it were.