Tape Rationale No. 9

A team of explosive experts from the Larimer County (Colorado) Sheriff's Department conducted a controlled explosion at their practice range facility, subjecting two of A4S's systems to explosions similar to those used in the London and Spain terrorists bombing attacks. The ShiftWatch(R) system was designed with two types of storage to provide redundancy-an internal hard drive and a digital tape drive to provide critical backup support.... As a result of the explosion, the internal hard drive and associated power and control components were destroyed while the digital tape in both units survived and all data and video on the digital tape was intact. [Emphasis added.]

"The test verified our theory that the use of a hard drive alone for recording data would not have survived to document the pre-blast events for investigation of an incident."