Companies Are Once Again Storing Data On Tape, Just in Case (marketwatch.com) 199
An anonymous reader shares a report: To stay up to date in the battle against hackers, some companies are turning to a 1950s technology. Storing data on tape seems impossibly inconvenient in an age of easy-access cloud computing. But that is the big security advantage of this vintage technology, since hackers have no way to get at the information. The federal government, financial-services firms, health insurers and other regulated industries still keep tape as a backup to digital records. Now a range of other companies are returning to tape as hackers get smarter about penetrating defenses -- and do much more damage when they do get in. Rob Pritchard, founder of the Cyber Security Expert consulting firm and associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute think tank, has noticed the steady resurgence of tape as part of best-practice backup strategies. "Companies of all sizes must be able to restore data quickly if needed," he says, "but also have a robust, slower-time, recovery mechanism should the worst happen." Mr. Pritchard, who works with a range of organizations to improve corporate cybersecurity practices, says: "A good backup strategy will have multiple layers. Cloud and online services have their place, but can be compromised."
Tape? (Score:5, Informative)
Apart from what I assume is a lower cost, is there any reason to use tape instead of just doing a rotation of RAID systems and disconnecting the unused ones?
Re:Tape? (Score:5, Informative)
Pretty much the reasons you would use tape in the first place.
Re:Tape? (Score:5, Insightful)
Reliability, portability, and length of time the data can be stored, possibly speed. LTO-4 and lower is definitely going to be slower. LTO-5+ might be faster for writing depending on the RAID setup.
If it's any kind of high performance system you usually do mirroring to a "hot" backup then do backup to tape from there so speed is not that relevant. You can do pretty well on reliability and portability by simply making many redundant copies. I don't think I'd plan to use it as ordinary backup, not even occasionally. To me tape belongs in the disaster recovery plan, like what if hackers root our servers or a rouge sysadmin goes berserk. The "put it on a tape, stick in a vault and pray you'll never need it but if you do you'll be really happy to have it" kind of backup.
This is particularly true if it's for legal compliance or you're the one maintaining the master data, imagine if you're say the DMV and lose the database of what driver licenses or license plates you've issued. Even in most epic of epic fuck-ups that wouldn't be acceptable. But I'm thinking it's the kind of service you contract out to a third party, maybe even with your own encryption because it doesn't really pay off until you've got huge amounts of data and a perspective of years and decades. Or well you can use tape for that, but then it's the kind of "non-disaster" backup I'd use HDDs for.
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Of course he keeps repeating that to himself. That's how RAID works, doesn't it?
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Just keep repeating that to yourself.
But is that a backup type of repetition to yourself or a RAID type of repetition to yourself?
Re:Tape? (Score:4, Informative)
Live mirroring is a way to make a backup, but isn't a backup until you break the mirror. Most RAID systems aren't really good at moving that sort of stuff around on the fly, unless you're talking about legacy "big box" storage systems that charge 10x-100x what the drives cost.
But, yeah, there are 3 distinct scenarios:
* Backup
* Disaster recovery
* Archiving
Tape is far and away the best for archiving, and is the easiest/cheapest way to do DR. It's not all that good for simple backup - snapshotting of some sort (even if the backup is in the same rack or even device as the main storage) wins for backup, since most restore requests are for recovery from user error, not hardware failure.
It makes good sense to optimize backup for fast recovery from accidental file deletion and the like, as long as you also have a DR strategy that will help you if you lose a rack full of storage (or datacenter etc).
Archiving is usually the legal compliance angle, not the other two use cases. Plenty of big companies have fancy cross-site DR strategies, but still archive to tape for compliance with "store your records for N years" compliance. Heck, the same truck from Iron Mountain likely takes both their paper records and tapes.
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Reliability, portability, and length of time the data can be stored, possibly speed. LTO-4 and lower is definitely going to be slower. LTO-5+ might be faster for writing depending on the RAID setup.
Pretty much the reasons you would use tape in the first place.
This,
Also ease of transportation. If I want to move my data off-site, especially to more than one location tape is the easiest way to do that. Speed and availability dont matter for off-site backups. Also cost, where can I get a 3TB HDD for £30? Some data I need to keep unadulterated records of for 7 years (some government requirements even preclude de-duplication, although this is rare).
Re:Tape? (Score:5, Informative)
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At thousands times more data the density would need to be high enough that cosmic radiation should start affecting tape also?
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ECC (Score:5, Informative)
At thousands times more data the density would need to be high enough that cosmic radiation should start affecting tape also?
Nearly every modern serious data storage (even some high-range SD flash cards: see Transcend) uses some form of error correction.
Neither tape nor harddisks (nor SD cards with ECC) are that much affected by single bit flips induced by cosmic radiation.
But HDD can still be affected by mechanical failures.
While on the other hand, "mechanical failure" is hardly a risk for a medium that is just basically just a long band of magnetic tape.
Also, the bitrot of tape is better known because it has been studied for a longer time.
Not to mention that modern tapes still has a lower density than modern harddisks (with all their "super-paramagnetic" and "shingled" tricks).
An LTO-7 tape is shy of 1km of lenght for 12mm width (they have exactly 11 square meters to store their native uncompressed raw 6.0 TB)
A Seagate drive of similar capacity crams its data on 6 platters (of 9cm diameter each - that's 0.076 square meters)
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You say it like its a good thing!
Error correction works fine for one, or possibly a small number of errors, such as you might get in DRAM, but if you get a lot of errors like on a bad disk or tape, it is capable of munging the data and declaring it fixed. And there is no way to know how many errors you have got. If you have errors, you get another tape out of the cupboard. (You
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If you have lots of errors you're not in the realm of cosmic rays or random bit flips, you're suffering from actual hardware failure.
If you have errors, you get another tape out of the cupboard.
Funny I did that with my last memory card and my last HDD when they started throwing errors, and at $20 for an 800GB tape the replacement HDD was about the same price.
You do not get an algorithm to "fix" the data if its your life on the line (or your $$$).
Defence in depth. Of course you do. Best still you get an algorithm that warns you of impending failures when they start logging at an unacceptable rate. Kind of like ECC and SMART data.
Cosmic radiation level (Score:2)
Error correction works fine for one, or possibly a small number of errors,
If the level of cosmic radiation that is bathing your workplace causes more than the occasional bit flip that the above poster has suggested [slashdot.org], I think you might be having more serious problems to consider.
Like needing to find shelter asap.
Or enjoy your new "fantastic 4" super-powers.
sd cards? how would you know what's going on inside?
Now for the more serious answers :
again ecc is used against the occasional random bitflip, as in the concerns about cosmic radiation by the above posters.
For the rest of your concern (i.e.: the media turning bad), the micro-contr
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You've never seen a kid handle a tape, have you?
Who let the dog out (Score:2)
You've never seen a kid handle a tape, have you?
If your kid is roaming free in the middle of your company's big data center, you have an entirely different level of problems...
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You've never seen a kid handle a tape, have you?
If your kid is roaming free in the middle of your company's big data center, you have an entirely different level of problems...
Tape monkey is their night job after making shoes and iPhones all day. ;)
Limiting costs (Score:2)
Indeed. Don't you think requiring that we get our tape storage systems from Fisher-Price is moving the goalposts a bit?
Yup, toddler proofing the tape storage system is going to be way too much costly.
I would suggest dialing back to something a little bit less rugged.
Better stick to a tape system that can only survive a mere orbital re-entry. That's going to be a lot more cheaper and simpler than toddler-proofing.
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Because data grows so fast, I imagine all 40 year old data will be absolutely tiny in comparison, and fit in the corner of whatever live/hot storage is in use.
I do like the premise of companies storing data locally.
I think all the "cloud backup" advocates have it backwards. The cloud's the best place for live data; but companies (and people) should have local backups of their clouds.
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That stuff is important enough to keep around, but I don't really want to have that sitting powered on and having to suck down watts for decades, nor do I really want to worry about what happens to it once a y
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What kind of data really needs to set powered off for 40 years, though?
I guess we know where you work... https://sputniknews.com/milita... [sputniknews.com] ;)
I do like the premise of companies storing data locally.
I think all the "cloud backup" advocates have it backwards. The cloud's the best place for live data; but companies (and people) should have local backups of their clouds.
Living in Houston, I am a big fan of geographically separate backups. When half of the city is under water, local backups may be as well.
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Re:Tape? (Score:5, Informative)
By design, tapes are sequential append, not random write. That makes it much harder to modify data. For tape stations that can be set to not allow programmatic rewinding, but tapes have to be physically cleared for rewind, it's even more of a security benefit this way.
Much like some of us like having important system logs go to an unbuffered dot matrix printer in dumb mode - there's no way to undo what's already written like a local log, no way to DoS logging to a remote syslog server, nor kill the print job while it's buffering, like a modern page based printer.
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[...] no way to DoS logging to a remote syslog server [...]
No, but you can DoS the printer merely by doing a lot of things that would get printed. Paper isn't infinite...
Fun example: Way back in the mainframe days, a place where my friend was working had a keycard-type lock for the machine room. Insert your card, door unlocks, remove card and enter the now unlocked door. It was a real nuisance for him and one Saturday, when he was working, he discovered that if he just left his card in the lock, the door would unlock, wait a few seconds, lock, reread the card,
Medium longevity (Score:5, Informative)
is there any reason to use tape instead of just doing a rotation of RAID systems and disconnecting the unused ones?
The main reason IS the one you mentioned (with tape, you basically disconnect only the medium, the magnetic tape. Not the whole read/write drive or even whole RAID cabinet. So you only need to pay for magnetic media as you expand capacity, not full blown electronics. A single tape drive and robot can last you quite some time).
But there is also some other practical consideration :
- Tape has been around for a lot of time. It has been already quite studied regarding its longevity. Its various failure modes are all well known (ghosting).
Manufacturer are now pretty much sure they can guarantee you that you can store a tape cartridge in fridge for Yyy years and it will still be 100% readable afterward.
- Hardisk are a bit more recent technology. We don't have quite the same guarantee regarding mechanical failures, bitrot, etc.
Since the whole purpose of this approach is to disconnect completely the storage, it means that the back-up disk will need to be reconnected and re-spun back to 7200RPMS at some point in the future. A small number out of all disk will fail and will not spin, due to various mechanical feature. A small number of the spinning disks will have suffered bitrot and will have corrupted.
Companies don't have the half-century long experience to make exact guarantee for Zzz years.
It's nothing horrible that can't be compensated with correct duplication and erasure coding. But it's still a bit less guaranteed.
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I would add a hacker who jumps a server could easily run a backup tape and reformat.
This could be a problem, given IT's propensity to suck.
I've gone to sites to do a recovery to find that, while the tapes were rotated out every day and stored off site, no one there, in the IT dept. understood CaptainDork's 6th corollary: The task is not to get the data on the tape as much as it is to get the data off the tape.
Every Wednesday, as faithfully as possible, I deleted an innocuous file on the server, pretended to
Restore tests as part of the backup cycle (Score:3)
on the tape as much as it is to get the data off the tape.
Of course, the fact that your tape is guaranteed to hold data for 50 years, isn't an excuse to actually wait 50 years before checking if you can actually read the data on it, or even find it.
Checking that you can restore the data should actually be part of the normal backup cycle.
(A very simple personal example :
- A test server that we use to develop and test new code, uses a local copy of the same data as the database used by the production server.
- We've implemented it, by having the test server rebuild i
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I've said it this way. Any idiot can write a backup program. However, it takes a genius to write a restore program.
Writing a backup program is stupidly simple. Writing a restore program is not (because now your backup program has to work
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I hear ya.
One site had an appliance and cloud backup.
I was consulting on an unrelated matter and laid down a text file. Two days later, I deleted the file and told management what I did and to ask IT to get the file back, stat.
IT was totally like a fish out of water.
They started reading the web site, making phone calls ...
I asked management, "Is this what you want when things go sideways?"
The IT manager was pissed and asked me what the fuck I was doing. My reply was, "Your job."
My allegiance was to the peep
Re:Medium longevity (Score:4, Interesting)
Yup, that's why our backup audit log had a weekly restore as one of the lines. We also checked the tick box in our backup software that read from the tape when done and compared CRC to that stored in the database, in theory this could differ from what was on disk, but at that point any modern backup program with dedupe is already hosed. We also did semi-annual DR testing which involved removing key people from the exercise to test cross training and documentation and also included deleting a whole filesystem and doing a restore from the backup system and doing spot check on files selected at random from the source filesystem.
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I admire your style.
If we had more people like you in the field, management could sleep better at night.
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First off, I apologize for your shortcomings.
Second, you can read this very slowly (feel free to move your lips while doing so):
I put a useless text file on the server. I deleted the useless text file. I restored the useless text file.
Third: You suck.
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You're petty, but happy.
And dismissed.
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RAID is not archival grade, and unused hard drives tend to die. SSDs do not have a long archival life because the electrons escape the gates. Once the threshold between a zero and a one is too close, the data is gone, beyond any hope of recovery.
Tape, on the other hand is archival grade. Unlike the garbage in the 1990s like 8mm, 4mm, and QIC, DLT and LTO have a long working life. In fact, at one place I worked for for five years, out of tens of thousands of tapes, I've seen two have hard write errors, a
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Lower cost?
Not in my experience.
Depending on business' risk analysis, I backed up to tape, on many servers, rotating 7 days or 30 days.
For the 30-day scenario, that meant 30 tapes for each server (6 at this one place). I did not reuse tapes more than a year. I would destroy those and buy new.
At my sites, I did full tape backup every night, including weekends. Friday's tape was overwritten Saturday and Sunday night.
I took each tape home with me for off-site storage, with written permission from management.
I
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The fact that you would make the management decision to trust your data to strangers (which is what IT is apparently doing today, hence this "new idea") probably means you weren't in management.
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Actually, all decisions should be made by management.
That's how my world rolls.
They let me keep the fireproof safe that they bought.
Look: When the freaking fire alarm went off, I was the first guy to hit the street, even if I knew somebody was burning popcorn in the microwave, and I had the backup tapes in my possession.
When I bugged out for hurricane evac, I'm the guy who had the backup tapes and the production server in the trunk.
Your management can do as they wish.
That's what mine did.
Not your call.
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$v®&ûIV‘ÓM&;@t-©a*Ú]iAIùk>K?,q]WSF
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This is for companies, not individuals. Everywhere I've worked has used tape backups, up to the present moment. Any company relying on cloud backup is a dangerous company to invest in. RAID storage is useless unless you keep those other disks at a remote location. Even the tape backups have the tapes transported to remote and safe locations (there are professional services that do this),
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Tapes are offline and disconnecting drives is a) technologically difficult and b) one main failure points for disks is when you start them.
Re:Tape? (Score:4, Informative)
NO, its not. If you drop it, the puck (the bit that the loading mechanism uses to pick the end of the tape) may fall out of its retaining slots. It can be put back in place if you are moderately careful. If the plastic case is not broken, the tape is probably readable.
I have dropped a fair number of tapes from desk height over the years (have been using them since the 1970's and designed both hardware and software for tape drives). None has failed as a result. I have also dropped a few H/Ds as well - some were damaged by falls of a few inches (they are actually more robust if operating). I have restored many tapes after 30 years. You will have a hard time finding an ST506 interface that connects to a modern computer.
I also seem to have significant problems with bit-rot on both Windows and Linux. This is noticeable as jpgs which have problems after sitting idle on the disk for a year or two, and occasionally docs and odts that won't read. Less of a problem with SCSI disks AFAICT, so I suspect hardware, but I did use DOS 4.0, so, I am not sure its not software.
I have definitely had brand new server grade HDs fail to start after 3 years on the shelf. I doubt used ones are more reliable.
it never went away (Score:5, Insightful)
It never went away at smart companies and those in regulated industries.
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It's a reliable long-term storage medium (Score:5, Insightful)
In terms of longevity, I classify storage this way, from short to long term:
- SSD
- 5.25" floppy disks (anachronistic, but existing)
- hard drives
- Taiyo Yuden CDs and DVDs
- EPROMs
- magnetic tape
- masked ROMs
- books
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punch cards.
Well, OK. The reason I didn't list punch cards, is because they were used for data entry and not data storage. The fact that they are a set of disconnected objects points in that direction, too.
Paper chemistry (Score:4, Interesting)
- books
Although that varies a bit depending on the chemistry of the paper (e.g.: acid-free vs. acidic)
On the other hand, the *toner* used to laser-print on them (basically, fused plastic) will surely outlive the acidic paper.
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On the other hand, the *toner* used to laser-print on them (basically, fused plastic) will surely outlive the acidic paper.
Indeed. But long before the paper has disolved your toner will stick the pages together in ways that you'll never be able to read what was on them without applying a liberal dose of science.
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- masked ROMs
- books
You forgot to include stone tablets and cave wall graffiti.
Re:It's a reliable long-term storage medium (Score:5, Interesting)
So the adage that magnetic media suffers from bit rot isn't quite as bad as you think... Cheap crappy disks and tapes will fail, but good quality ones last a good long time.
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You can never...ever... trust SSDs.
If you have no data retention requirements, go right ahead but pal, you first. There's simply no way I'd trust SSDs to be anything other than consumables at this time.
Its all about Average Bandwidth (Score:3)
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Then there's the other half (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're backing up your company's data to tape... have you - even once - went through the restore process to make sure you can actually recover it?
Yes, I have run restoration drills, regularly. (Score:2)
And your point is quite correct. 50% of the time I have run restore drills, I have turned up a failure in the restore process which got fixed.
What I do is "delete" something on a random basis, wait for the easy recovery options to time out, then ask for a restoration of something that has definitely had to go to tape.
--PeterM
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We were told to use a certain cloud backup service at work, to save on costs. It was a disaster, amazingly slow, and it would suck up all your bandwidth while you were at home on your own dime. Later a co-worker lost his files and needed to recover. He could only recover one file at a time, not do a full restore. I advised everyone to instead just get a hard drive at the store (4 terabytes for under $100) and encrypt it and use Time Machine. Not IT approved though. Later they went with Box instead, anot
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(oops intended as response to a different comment)
I reassign null to be the tape device (Score:2)
"It's backup day today so I'm pissed off. Being the BOFH, however, does have it's advantages. I reassign null to be the tape device - it's so much more economical on my time as I don't have to keep getting up to change tapes every 5 minutes. And it speeds up backups too, so it can't be all bad can it? Of course not."
Simon Travaglia [bofharchive.com]
3-2-1 (Score:2)
Lots of companies never stopped (Score:2)
It's pretty hard to beat tape for longer-term backups.
In photo and video, tape never left (Score:2)
Once footage and images are done with as a project closes, tape was and is the perfect place for them. There is flat out no need to have archival storage on spinning platters that gather dust on sleds.
tertiary storage (Score:2)
The best backups are offline and offsite (Score:2)
You want at least one backup offline so it doesn't get screwed up by malware. And you want it off-site so you'll still have it in case your house burns down. Tape or WORM (write once, read many) optical media is better than HDDs because you can't modify the data after it's written (at least on tape drives with a read-onl
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You can get read-only devices for HDDs - they sit in between the drive and SATA controller. It blocks all ATA commands that would alter the contents of the drive.
Called a write-blocker, and mostly used in digital forensics so that an investigator can safely hook up a suspect's drive and take an image without any risk of accidentally writing to it and so possibly compromising the evidence.
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Yeah, the read/write nature of hard drives isn't really the problem with using them for long-term storage. The real problem is that they're relatively fragile.
Maybe they've been watching MR ROBOT (Score:2)
They just have to get it done quickly before the dark army gets wind of their plans...
Depends on how sneaky you are. (Score:2)
(Hmmm.. A nony mouse? Eh, it's been over 40 years, I guess the statute of limitations has run out.)
Back in the days of Univac mainframes, I wanted a file that was not accessible to me. It was backed up on tape, but accessing the manually mounted by the uncooperative operator backup tape?
However, this was also the days of disk being expensive per kilobyte. Univac's solution was "Rollout/rollback"; under certain criteria, the Univac would release all the files's storage back to the free disk pool, and mark
stone tablets and cave drawings (Score:2)
An option, I guess .. but .... (Score:2)
I was really pleased with the improvements we saw at 2 different companies when we finally let go of outdated LTO or DLT backup tape solutions.
It may be true that tape has a better chance of being readable after sitting in storage for a long enough period of time. But my experience was, the tape drives themselves would suffer from breakdowns causing them to unspool or "eat" tapes, too. The older DLT drives I used to work with were especially prone to failure modes causing them not to sense the "leader" at t
Surprise? (Score:2)
Not really. Once all your company data is stashed on someone else's computers what's your DR plan if those computers go down? Having a local copy might be handy, eh? It doesn't matter if the company's got the sharpest lawyers on the planet, they aren't going to be able to perform a bare-metal restore and get the business back online---despite what it says in that iron-clad language they insisted had to be in the contract.
Cloud and online services have their place. (Score:3)
If you're not a raving moron, that place is in the trashcan of history (assuming it's not your own cloud or service).
it's not the tape that makes it secure... (Score:2)
Hackers can't get at tape eh? (Score:2)
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You do know that applications were once stored on paper tape, right?
Tape!
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Cuneiform on clay? You youngsters with your hipster ways. I'll stick with notched sticks, thank you very much.
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Oh, I see what you did th - OWW! Careful with those sticks! They're sharp!
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If that is enough. As the Tape is basically inside the write coil core when data is written, magnetic field strengths used on tape are extreme. The other problem is that tapes are non-conductive. An EMP is going to do nothing at all.
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You'd need a magnetar in orbit to erase tapes.
It's the only way to be sure.
Re:One good EMP from DPRK... (Score:4, Insightful)
It is pretty easy to protect cold tape from an EMP, even if it is at a close range.
The problem is that Tape really isn't any more secure than anything else-- just modifying the tape drive firmware could easily corrupt data. With a little extra work it could encrypt the data and allow DR simulations to run as long as the event horizon hasn't been reached.
Re:One good EMP from DPRK... (Score:4, Insightful)
Tape lets your transform the problem from digital security to physical security, and that's something a lot of companies are pretty good at. Further, very few attackers are good at both (you're pretty much down to governments at that point).
You really can't beat tape for archiving. The cost per TB is small (and there's no ongoing cost beyond physical storage), and it's basically immune to stuff like EMP. There's actually is a chip in some tape cartridges to burn out, but losing that won't matter much.
As far as hacking the firmware - IIRC, modern tape drives still requires that you use a firmware tape during the process, so stand-alone tape drives at least would be immune to a purely online attack. Worst case, though, you just buy new tape drives (or use the new ones you have in a box at Iron Mountain next to all your boxes of tapes) to recover.
With a little extra work it could encrypt the data and allow DR simulations to run as long as the event horizon hasn't been reached.
Tape drive firmware is like coding for the Atari 2600. Lots of things are theoretically possible, but very few people could actually pull it off. For this example, only in recent years has encryption hardware been added to drives - without that, there just aren't enough resources in a tape drive to encrypt on the fly (most tape drives can't do asymmetric crypo at all as they don't have the accessible memory to even hold a cert - tape buffer memory is sort of walled off and not general purpose).
Re:One good EMP from DPRK... (Score:4, Interesting)
IIRC, modern tape drives still requires that you use a firmware tape during the process, so stand-alone tape drives at least would be immune to a purely online attack. .
Nope. HP Tape Tools https://www.hpe.com/us/en/prod... [hpe.com] allow you to update firmware, perform maintenance, etc on most modern HP tape drives that are attached to your server. So conceivably, a hacker could access the backup server (assuming it has HP tape drives attached physically to it), and inject their own firmware (unless there is safeguards in the software to not allow random firmware packages to be uploaded).
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Have you done it? The last time I messed with LTO tape tools (which everyone builds on) they let you download new FW and start the upgrade process, but the actual process required sticking a tape in the drive to use as a FUP tape. The tool would manage it all for you, but there was that step. Wouldn't be shocking if they changed that though, I think it was a crutch to avoid having double the flash memory on the drive.
Still, sounds like a stuxnet-style attack that would need government-level resources beh
Re: One good EMP from DPRK... (Score:2)
This isn't really a story about companies going back to tape as much one of companies going back to an actual sane backup solution.
Tape just happens to be the tried, tested, and true system with plenty of support infrastructure still around. All the other solutions aren't really direct archive replacements... process wise.
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This isn't a tech news site, it's an ad provider.
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The big advantage of 200bpi was that you could sprinkle iron filings on the tape and read the bit patterns for disaster recovery. (Not that I would want to read more than a couple of 80 column card images that way).
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This site caters to people that think tape is some archaic thing nobody uses, because audio tapes, VHS and the likes went away. Those are the people that produce ad impressions.
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The cloud is just somebody else's computer. It wouldn't suprise me to find out Amazon is using tape for Glacier. But the idea that Amazon will be around longer than tape is as true about the longevity of companies like Sun, Atari, AOL, SCO and dozens of other companies that are now defunct or in their death throws.
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Tape almost never goes bad, with over 15,000 tapes at my last job we had one failure to read and 2 failures to write (one of which I dropped so it really doesn't count). I read an original DLT IV tape in an SDLT 320 drive over 18 years after it was written (tax document, apparently the lawyers had a question on something and there was a 20 year lookback period for this particular property tax) and routinely read LTO tapes that were nearly a decade old. Oh, and restore from Glacier is unbelievably expensive
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Says the guy who has never used disc and dedupe based backups and seen how much faster and efficient it is, and simpler to manage from a scsi perspective.
For years I was a dedicated tape guy, very reluctant to move to disc. Ever since we got our datadomain though, my thoughts have changed. Of course, if you can afford both systems and the maintenance licensing they incur, use both!
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Nobody ever left anything important in the cloud.
Nobody with a competent and adequately funded IT department (even if it's just one person) ever left anything important in the cloud.