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.

Re:Tape?

[Kjella]

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.

it never went away

[banbeans]

It never went away at smart companies and those in regulated industries.

It's a reliable long-term storage medium

[blind biker]

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

Re:It's a reliable long-term storage medium

[freeze128]

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.

Medium longevity

[DrYak]

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.

Then there's the other half

[93 Escort Wagon]

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?

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)