Digital Data Storage (DDS) is a format that evolved from the Digital Audio Tape (DAT) technology. It is a format mainly used for data and media storage and for data backup. Sony, Maxell and Hewlett-Packard (HP), developed the DDS data storage format in 1989. A very important feature of the DDS tape format is that tapes written by one brand’s drive are capable of being read by another manufacturer’s drive. All certified DDS cartridges feature the Media Recognition system which prevents you from accidentally writing valuable data to basic DAT or other incompatible formats. DDS backup tapes have an expected life of at least 10 years. DDS and DAT tape products available at Tape4Backup are: DDS-2, DDS-3, DDS-4 (or DAT40), DDS-5 (or DAT72) and DAT160 tape media and DDS cleaning tapes and barcode labels.