AIT tape drives come with a self-cleaning mechanism that prevents the necessity for frequent cleaning, however you still have to clean your tape drive once a week or fortnight at least for people who backup their data very frequently. However for regular users, we recommend cleaning your AIT tape drive when the cleaning light or LED or lamp lights up. We provide HP and Sony AIT tape cleaning cartridges for drives that use AIT-1, AIT-2, AIT-3, AIT-4 and AIT-5 tapes.