I didn't say it was the only way. I said it was the only practical way. The erase function takes too long per tape to be used in bulk.
--- W. Curtis Preston Backup Blog @ www.backupcentral.com VP Data Protection, GlassHouse Technologies -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Schneider, John Sent: Friday, December 14, 2007 8:27 AM To: ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] Any market for used tape media? Curtis, 3590 tapes are where IBM servo tracks were first invented (unless it was 3570, I may be mistaken). 3592 and LTO are follow-on technologies built from those first ones. De-guassing shouldn't be the only way this could be done. It ought to be possible to write multiple passes of bit-patterns to a tape, making the old data unreadable. If you look at the "tapeutil" utility IBM provides with the atape drivers, it includes an erase function. It would be easy to write a program to mount the tapes in a drive one at a time to erase them. But I could not find any documentation online that really explained what the erase function was doing, and if it was thorough enough to withstand HIPAA requirements. Best Regards, John D. Schneider Lead Systems Administrator - Storage Sisters of Mercy Health Systems 3637 South Geyer Road St. Louis, MO 63127 Phone: 314-364-3150 Cell: 314-486-2359 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Curtis Preston Sent: Friday, December 14, 2007 2:19 AM To: ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] Any market for used tape media? De-gaussing is the only practical way to erase a significant quantity of tapes, and degaussing will render a number of modern tape formats useless forever. One of them is LTO. Not sure about 3x9x. (It's because, in addition to removing the data, degaussing also removes the servo tracks on the tape, and the drive won't recognize the tape.) My opinion: It's not worth the risk. --- W. Curtis Preston Backup Blog @ www.backupcentral.com VP Data Protection, GlassHouse Technologies -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Schneider, John Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2007 1:28 PM To: ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU Subject: [ADSM-L] Any market for used tape media? Greetings, We have thousands of 3590, 3592, and LTO tapes which are about to be decommissioned when their tape libraries are replaced. Some of the 3592 and LTO tapes are only 1-2 years old. Is there any market for used tape media? And if so, do any of you know of a way to sufficiently erase them so that they can be sold without security concerns about releasing data? Best Regards, John D. Schneider Lead Systems Administrator - Storage Sisters of Mercy Health Systems 3637 South Geyer Road St. Louis, MO 63127 Phone: 314-364-3150 Cell: 314-486-2359 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
