The pros and cons of recycling backup tapes

Posted on Sep 22, 2009 in Records Management News

The tape stor­age end game: The pros and cons of recy­cling backup tapes By Alan Earls 21 Sep 2009 | SearchDataBackup.com

As many tape backup users — and all tape ven­dors will tell you, tape stor­age is the unsung, unglam­orous main­stay of data reten­tion. Despite the low and declin­ing costs of disk stor­age, tape, which is com­par­a­tively cheap to buy and has low energy costs, remains one of the most eco­nom­i­cal ways to store and back up data.

But what hap­pens when you move up to a more mod­ern for­mat of tape, to disk backup, or sim­ply choose to dis­pose of old tapes? For years, third par­ties have offered another option — sell the tapes and recy­cle them to oth­ers cus­tomers. How­ever, accord­ing to OEMs and oth­ers, this sec­ondary tape mar­ket is fraught with risk. With no stan­dards and no over­sight, third par­ties fre­quently erase only the header infor­ma­tion from the tapes they acquire, poten­tially leav­ing giga­bytes of sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion avail­able for perusal. While there don’t appear to be any doc­u­mented inci­dents of major data breaches occur­ring as a result of poor tape recy­cling prac­tices, the poten­tial for dis­as­ter is there.

Sen­si­tive data still on recy­cled tapes

“We have pur­chased recy­cled tapes on the mar­ket and found that we could eas­ily read large amounts of data, some of which could be con­sid­ered sen­si­tive, such as social secu­rity num­bers and hos­pi­tal records,” said Tom Lally, vice pres­i­dent of Imation’s com­mer­cial divi­sion. In fact, in lab tests run on 100 “recer­ti­fied” tapes pur­chased com­mer­cially, Ima­tion dis­cov­ered intel­li­gi­ble infor­ma­tion on one-third of the car­tridges. And that’s the kind of risk that should be a wakeup call for IT man­agers, he said. Fur­ther­more, noted Lally, in Ima­tion tests, mul­ti­ple degauss­ing passes were needed to ren­der data fully inac­ces­si­ble; mean­ing that about the only prac­ti­cal solu­tion for those intent on com­plete data destruc­tion is shred­ding and/or incin­er­at­ing the tape.

Read more here http://searchdatabackup.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid187_gci1365403,00.html

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