- Bad Tapes Dark Data Dark Days
Bad Tapes Part 3: Dark Data, Dark Days
Magnetic Backup Tapes Often Sit in Storage Boxes -Unlabelled, Unknown and Unloved! This Is Referred to As Dark Data: Known To Exist but Not Understood
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März 28, 2024
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This is part three of a five part report which explores what led to data over-retention on backup tapes, defines the current situation and outlines how to remediate data holdings to reduce ongoing operational costs and regulatory risk. Find out more about this report by reading the introduction or downloading the full Bad Tapes report here.
Magnetic Backup Tapes Make for Terrible Long-Term Archival Storage.
Because magnetic backup tapes were never designed to be used as archives, long-term catalogue retention is an afterthought at best. When beginning remediation projects, it’s common to find vast arrays of storage media with unknown contents. Thousands of tapes sit in archive boxes whose custodians have long since left the business. The catalogue that once tracked the contents has been lost. This is ‘dark data’: data that is known to exist, but is not understood.
Why Don’t Tapes Work As Long-Term Archival Storage?
Magnetic backup tapes suffer from:
- Limited life span — The effective life span of magnetic tapes spans from eight to twelve years — archived data is often kept for much longer. Beyond that time scale, data will need to be migrated to new tapes, or a different medium.
- Environment — To prolong the life of backup tapes, they must be kept in optimal climate-controlled environments. Slight deviations in temperature or humidity will reduce storage life. These environments are expensive to establish and maintain.
- Labels and catalogues — Each tape should have a physical label, ideally a detailed barcode. Each tape should also have an electronic catalogue that details the contents of the tape. Establishing and maintaining an adequate catalogue requires clear processes, shared institutional awareness and sustained effort, over years. As such, organisations often hold many hordes of tape without any catalogue, or perhaps only a handful of words or a single sentence to describe terabytes of data.
- Poor data availability — Locating and extracting tape-based data is time-consuming, expensive and often futile. The chances of finding all required data in a complete and defensible manner are low. A single backup can span multiple physical tapes. If one tape is missing or corrupted, the rest is likely unusable.
Accessing archival data should be fast and simple. If it’s not, the wrong storage solution is in place. In our experience, organisations facing litigation that have been forced to draw data from their backup tapes find it a slow, frustrating and expensive process that has complicated or compromised discovery and threatened their position in the matter.
Ask Yourself These Questions:
- How many tapes do you have?
- How many different types of tapes do you have?
- Do you know how old your tapes are?
- Do you know where all tapes are held?
- Do you have a tape catalogue?
- How much are you paying each month to store tapes?
- Is any of this really necessary, or are you using tape backups as an archive?
Datum
März 28, 2024
Ansprechpartner
Managing Director