Companies Are Once Again Storing Data On Tape, Just in Case (marketwatch.com)

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."

Comments

Tape?

[DontBeAMoran]

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?

[redmid17]

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.

Re:Tape?

[houstonbofh]

Hard drives do not like to sit powered off. In 3 to 5 years the fail rate is significant. Tape is fine for that. I have restored 40 year old tapes.

Re:Tape?

[arth1]

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.

ECC

[DrYak]

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)