For anybody who is into this this is a a good excuse to share a presentation from Vintage Computer Fest West 2020 re: magnetic tape restoration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKvwjYwvN2U

The presentation explores using software-defined signal processing analyze a digitized version of the analog signal generated from the flux transitions. It's basically moving the digital portion of the tape drive into software (a lot like software-defined radio). This is also very similar to efforts in floppy disk preservation. Floppies are amazingly like tape drives, just with tiny circular tapes.

At the very least, and the cost for this perhaps would be prohibitive, but some mechanism to duplicate the raw flux off the tape onto another tape in an identical format, a backup of the backup. This would allow for attempts to read the data that may be potentially destructive to the media (for example, breaking the tape accidentally) and not lose the original signal.

Sounds like at least in this case that ASIC in the drive was doing some (non trivial) signal processing. Would be interesting to know how hard it would be to get from the flux pattern back to zeros and ones. I guess with a working drive you can at least write as many test patterns as you want until you maybe figure it out.

You still need to know where to look, the format, and using specialized equipment which cost wasn't driven down by mass manufacturing, so, in theory yes, in practice not.

(Completely guessing here with absolute no knowledge of the real state of things)

Yes. There’s some guy on YouTube who does stuff like that (he reverse engineered the audio recordings from a 747 tape array) but it can be quite complicated.