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Very old audio equipment is in a similar boat - I know archivists who are prioritizing stuff for digitization based on the number of tape head hours they think they've got left in older machines.

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Is contact absolutely required in such old machines - I wonder if you could float the tape using, say, air [1], ultrasound, or silicon spray, or even just carefully fitted wheels in order to maximize life of the head itself.

I'm surprised generic non-contact magnetic readers haven't been developed for retro tech given the prevalence of magnetic storage tech for HDDs.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_bearing

I'd wonder more if a newer more modern head could also be used on the same tape at the same time (a few inches over on a slightly extended tape path), with the output of the "original" used to train software to interpret the higher resolution data coming from the new head.

Seems to me that might in some ways be similar to some things required for software defined radio signal processing.

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