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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."
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?
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It never went away at smart companies and those in regulated industries.
You do know that applications were once stored on paper tape, right?
Tape!
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The tapes are 9 track, actually.
I remember when the high density tapes we mounted were 6250 bpi.
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
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
At least it would fry msmash's posit....wait, negatronic "brain" electronics, and Slashdot would be freed from its bondage to the Soros-funded BIZX, LLC political interests that have NO BUSINESS owning a tech news site.
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Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. Andrew Tanenbaum - the author of Minix
Wax cylinder or GTFO.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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?
#DeleteChrome
- 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 ]
"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
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
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)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
3 copies of the data 2 on different media 1 not at the same place as the other 2. Current corporate entity backs up to a Separate SAN and then the SAN to tape, tapes go away and rotated on a yearly basis.
~corporate tool, but employed~
Wax? Luxury! Cuneiform on clay tablet is all you need.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
You don't reuse the same tape everyday. Might lose some data if you need to restore an older tape, but that can happen no matter what the media.
It's pretty hard to beat tape for longer-term backups.
Cuneiform on clay? You youngsters with your hipster ways. I'll stick with notched sticks, thank you very much.
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 its local database using the yesterday evening backup of the production server.
- If the backup couldn't be read back, the "restore" process will fail on the test server and will be immediately visible.)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
I setup tape in my organization as well. 100% virtual infrastructure with primary backups/snapshots on site SAN storage. Replicated backups/snapshots at a 2nd physical DR site connected via owned / leased fiber. Tertiary backups to tape and shipped off to a nation storage repository.
That's what I tell my friends and customers. I have a 12 TB NAS for daily backups (among other things), but I also back that up monthly to a RAID enclosure which gets stored elsewhere.
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-only switch - something I've long complained that HDDs should have). I've accidentally copied a bad file over its backup, instead of vice versa while trying to restore a non-corrupt version.
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.
Could the editors just not find a picture of an IBM 2400 series drive? Have we actually forgotten what 9-track tapes look like (and 7-track)?
Ah, yes, only 257 megabytes per 3600 feet reel
What planet is Slashdot on? Silicon Valley's hipster fashion planet? "Once again" seems like everybody went to the cloud with everything and now it's coming back. That's silly. Every ducking company I worked for in the last 25 years always stored data on tapes up to today. Nobody ever left anything important in the cloud. To name a few: HSBC, Siemens, Electrolux, Volvo. Right in this moment I am requesting commercial proposals for renewing our library hardware support for the upcoming years.
I wish I had an app to mod you up !
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).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I've been in shops with tape backup back in the days when it was the cheapest, densest form of storage. Like everything else it has it's pros and cons. One big con that I remember is that it is not random access. You want a file at the end of the tape you have to spool all the way to the end of the tape to get to it. Another thing I remember is that they kept coming out with new technology tape drives and sometimes the new drives weren't compatible with the formats of the old tapes. (And tape drives were expensive).
Another thing about tape is that it is erasable. When CDs came out I though a ha, here is the ideal medium. You burn a CD, it's random access, and you can't record over it. (Depends on the kind of CD you have of course.) However, I guess the recordable CDs aren't considred long lasting enough to be good archive material. And maybe people feel the density of CDs and their successors the DVDs isn't all that good either.
I still think the ideal technology would be something like a CD/DVD that could last a long time even in relatively harsh conditions (stored in an attic that isn't air-conditioned all summer long), or a place with high humidity, or whatever, it would be random access and once written to, never erased. One problem also is, will there be equipment to read the damn thing 20 or 30 or 40 years down the line.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
Modern write-once tapes cannot be altered once written. You might be able to modify the firmware in a way that could destroy the tape, but that's the limit.
This isn't a tech news site, it's an ad provider.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
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.
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.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
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.....
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
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).
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
They just have to get it done quickly before the dark army gets wind of their plans...
Just be sure to take the completely offline. Not still in a jukebox. Back in 90s the ISP I was using got hacked and all data wiped to include the backups. Why because the tapes were still in the drive and they mounted them and deleted the data. Same issue with offsite replication of hard disks if those also get hit same problem. So move the tapes to that shoe box under the bed. ;-)
Oh, I see what you did th - OWW! Careful with those sticks! They're sharp!
#DeleteFacebook
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 so it's fine if you have a WORN requirement but for true use it's more expensive than doing it yourself if you have any kind of scale.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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!
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
(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 it "Rolled Out". Any attempt to access the file would create an automatic "Rollback" job, which would ask the operator to mount the specific backup tape to reload that file.
So, I started a batch job, called it "Rollback", that copied the file I wanted from the backup tape.
There were ways the operator could have told that this was not a legitimate rollback run, but fortunately, this operator was not that observant.
Anyway, "safe from hackers because tape" isn't necessarily so. What process accesses the tapes? How secure is it? How secure is the whole system against spoofing of one kind or another? What's the weakest link?
These are proven long term storage methods.
mfwright@batnet.com
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 the start or end of a tape properly, causing it to unspool.
Tapes would physically wear out too, after so many read and write cycles. The friction of the tape dragging past the heads on the drive was the reason you had to regularly run cleaning tapes to keep the drives happy and working well. They physically stripped some of the magnetic material off the tapes as they were used.
"Best practices" for backups involved regularly buying new sets of cartridges and taking older ones out of service in backup rotations by some date you wrote on their labels. But that used to get costly and was kind of wasteful.
I guess every technology has its place - so if going back to tape improves security and solves problems for some businesses, great! But I'd rather try my best to secure the environment without resorting to that, wherever I could. The modern backup systems that do real-time backups to hard drives are so much more flexible and make restores so much quicker and less painful.
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.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
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.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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 behind it to actually become real. At that point very little is safe. (There was some place - Argentina maybe? - where a bunch of government records were conveniently destroyed in a fire in an Iron Mountain facility during a scandal, which pretty much requires military incendiaries. No backup is safe from that sort of threat.)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You'd need a magnetar in orbit to erase tapes.
It's the only way to be sure.
WTB [sig], PST!!!
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...
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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, 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-controller inside the sd card handle the flash management.
At least, on high range models, they can move the data from "about to fail" block to fresh blocks, and mark "failed to unreusable state" blocks and retire them.
(Works both during read-modify-write cycles "dynamic wear levelling", and also with old data currently sitting on the disk "static wear levelling").
Some card even have status reporting (but its not as standardized as "smart" on ata/sata/scsi/usb).
- so on these, with the proper tooling, you can actually get some prediction and indication of general health.
All the high-end sd card that I have seen go bad due to eventually accumulating too much corruption (the inevitable death of any flash media) have locked themselves in read-only mode.
- so on these, you notice that they'll go bad really soon when they stop to write, and you still have a little bit of time to copy data of them.
Of course, this requires the microcontroller to be powered.
But given that flash media mostly decays by erasing, the microcontroller would be working at the most crucial time.
Still, the sd card could be victim to cell-voltage decay while staying in cold storage.
(But then, error correction *can* detect it, and the controller of flashmedia *can* attempt to re-read the block with decayed voltage. So this type of decay on flash media usually results in awefully slow read rates, rather than data corruption and static wear-leveling can eventually recover it)
Basically, keep in mind that high range sd cards behave like some kind of ssd.
Except one with a lot less ram in the microcontroler (do not expect to have as many working chunks kept in memory).
And with much slower data rates (the controler is usually talking to one single nand flash chip).
And not a very standardized monitoring protocol.
And of course speaking a different protocol (mmc instead of sata).
Compact flash card are even closer : they are basically pata ssds, but with a smaller connector. some of the high range even support straight smart protocol like any other pata/sata device.
That's unlike xd cards or the older smartmedia which are basically direct access to the nand chip.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
If you're not a raving moron, that place is in the trashcan of history (assuming it's not your own cloud or service).
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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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.
But I wonder if offline storage is really that secure in actual implementation. The last lessee... one, three, six... six or seven companies I worked for all use the same one (1) company for their offsite tape storage. (You know who I mean.) This creates a single point of failure, kind of analogous to a mechanical cloud -- lifeblood data from several companies all in one place. It's just a little harder to access. Maybe it's really secure -- I've never been there -- but maybe getting physical access to the tapes is as simple as getting a job there as a janitor. Or doing some social engineering to appear to be a customer needing to do a restore.
Maintaining your own airgapped tape archive on-site might be practical, as long as you have a process for vetting employees with physical access that actually works. I've seen too many companies "really serious about security" who nevertheless hand the keys to every door in the place to a $15/hour janitor with minimal vetting. At my first job as a sysadmin, the site manager gave the keypad combination for our machine room to the non-english-speaking janitors so they could come in and buff the raised machine room floor. Besides the security concern, we couldn't figure out for the longest time why the disk error rate always increased on Wednesday nights.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I guess this isn't a very good time to bring up Blu-ray, the backup that is resistant to magnets and hackers at the same time.
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.
Your tagline cannot be the truth, btw. An ASR-33 is upper case only. Unless you have some really fancy filtering going on in a proxy between your terminal and the modem.
If a manetar were in orbit, we wouldn't have to worry about anything.
Oracle bought Storagetek. Lots of Govt agencies use big frickin' tape units from them. By big, I mean the size you could live in. They're like 15' X 30'. I think each tape holds something incredible, like 70 TB. Trouble is, Oracle just fired a whole bunch of Solaris, and tape backup people. Maybe they can hire them again.