Your questions bring a thousand thoughts and answers to mind, but I would like to comment on using tape as archival storage. 1 - it isn't a long life media, it was never designed to be. 2 - tape sizes change all the time, so would the tape drives necessary to restore them. In the past ten years, we have gone through 4 generations of tape drives and rotate the tapes several times before discarding. We only use tape for backup storage, not archival or retention storage.
Ginny Jones
(Virginia A. Jones, CRM, FAI)
Records Manager
Information Technology Division
Newport News Dept. of Public Utilities
Newport News, VA
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-----Original Message-----
From: Records Management Program [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Hugh Smith
Sent: Tuesday, August 30, 2016 5:53 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Get Ready for Electronic Records Day 2016 (Minimal humor )
Here is a thought; and I would like to see the worldly wizards here tell me their thoughts.
I have been reading White Papers on Tape, Back-up tape, Cloud and Archival tape storage. If you like; Dick King can do for you what he did to me, and make “the world of the Cloud” think you are a hot prospect and now they include me in all the hottest technology topics. Just kidding Dick.
I told all the insurance companies on the Internet you would like some whole life insurance so look for some calls. ;~)
But according to the White Guys…. BYW is a White Paper racist. I know a Black Swan is an unexpected bad thing. But things are so confusing today.
But back to Tape! The people who manufacture tape say that sales are up about 15% in one White Paper. But they said the role of tape is different. Instead of tape as the emergency back up recovery or business continuity support, the tapes are now kept archive tape as the vast majority of the tape usage.
They say the server room or data center is backed up to the Cloud and many, many data centers do not even have tape drives. (If that is true, how are they creating tape? ) 1) So is that a lie?
Clouds might spin tape archives to support their longer term storage. Or maybe as a back up for instances of Ransomware.
I do not believe that Cloud are spinning tape and sending them to their clients. 2) What would you load them on?
But supposing the guy in the White Paper, which is now shady, so we can call it a grey paper. Are corporations fearing the Cloud, hacking, ransomware and just the fact that Clouds are now entering their 4th and 5th year are coming to the end of their contractual requirement to keep your online records online. And, therefore the owners are back to creating tape but simply as archival tape storage.
Let’s say the FIRELOCK Media Vault salesman is the canary in the coal mine; I am not seeing any move to vault archives of tape. 3) Is this a propaganda program by the LTO tape producers? 4) Or wishful thinking?
But if organizations were believing that archival tape is the best approach to protecting their longer term electronic records, storing them in machine readable tapes. 5) That would be a good thing for a records manager right?
Maybe they are right but if they are then tape drives would be on the upsurge? Or is Big Data sensing, “What a mistake? We are not selling as many tape drives and we also are not selling as much tape?
We are greedy and we want it all. To store the cloud and then convince them after it is all in the cloud that “Hey, we forgot to tell you this isn’t really safe!” “So you need to buy some servers of your own to back up our Cloud because you can never have too many clouds” By the way, you also need your own tape makers and tape readers and buy a bunch of tape because you should archive this in case you need it after five years.
Or is this another “Hugh, nobody knows and It’s different for everyone.”
But if archival tape is really a thing then maybe there is oxygen in this mine shaft. And maybe the records manager goes back to the era of protecting the archival records.
To answer the questions above and you are not a real records manager, then you must disclose you sell LTO’s for a living or you own a Cloud and you are looking to sell some old tape drives.
The questions are
1) So is that a lie? (That data centers don’t even have tape drives any more.)
2) If your Cloud provider sent you a stack of tapes from your cloud archive; What would you load them on?
3) Is this a propaganda program by the LTO tape producers? That archival tape is the new wish list?
4) Or wishful thinking?
5) That would be a good thing for a records manager right?
Remember Dick, it was a White Paper that started this. No more links to White Papers. I tried to write this in white ink so it would be a Black Paper but the Listserve would not accept it. So if you received an email that was totally blank that was me. Hey it is after 5:00 so this might start your Happy Hour off with a laugh. But my questions are serious. Who can answer them?
Hugh Smith
FIRELOCK Fireproof Modular Vaults
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(610) 756-4440 Fax (610) 756-4134
WWW.FIRELOCK.COM
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