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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."
But would that really apply for tapes capable of storing "modern" amounts of data?
At thousands times more data the density would need to be high enough that cosmic radiation should start affecting tape also?
- 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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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, and zero with hard read errors. So, out of the petabytes of LTO-3 to LTO-7 data, those are good odds.
Tape isn't that expensive for the enterprise. $5000 gets you a 24 tape LTO-7 autochanger that goes into two RUs, and hooks up via SAS. You can then hook it to your Veeam server as a way to do D2D2T, and have an air-gapped backup. Encryption? Trivial. Set a password, make sure the password is in a recoverable place, and then, if a tape falls off the back of the Iron Maiden truck, it is just a trivial loss. No encryption, and that becomes a front page headline.
I trust tape far more than the cloud. At least I know that if the Net takes a crap, my data is still restorable.
I recently booted up my old Apple //e computer and was amazed to see that nearly ALL of my old floppies still worked. These are disks that were formatted in the mid 80's. The disks that failed were off-brand cheaper disks that were purchased more recently. I also remember buying 100 3.5" disks from Computer City in the late 90's. ALL of them failed within 5 years. Many were DOA right out of the box, and were unable to be formatted.
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.
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.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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... 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).
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....