Transcribed

The history of backup tape

The history of backup tape it's a bit like the seven stages of man 1145 The potential The leader In its infancy Nice idea but Full of promise the reality is scary In its dotage Reverting to infancy - the reality is scary and Middle age Getting a bit fat Just a boy young adult An established as a teen Elder statesman The potential is obvious (but very expensive) Resting on its laurels and the but a bit of a technology and the leader in round the middle showing signs of upgrades aren't working nuisance the field wear and tear it isn't even a nice idea anymore 1951 2011 Unbelievably tape backup is still the backup choice for many UK businesses You left it where? Office Dangers 29% store their backup tapes onsite! 21% take their tapes home Testing times Of those that do, 77% found their backup tape failed to restore 34% do not test their backup tapes Major tape loss incidents 1996 2005 2007 2008 Credit Lyonnaise lost Zurich loses a tape A busy year for lost backup tapes. CitiGroup lost a tape containing personal A backup tape was stolen containing details on 650,000 of its insurance customers including crucial bank data and from a car in Ohio containing the social security numbers of 1.3 archives after an office fire destroyed their backup tapes which information on 4 million customers. million individuals. The 46,000 UK customers. had been stored onsite. data has never been The details of 15,000 patients stored on unencrypted tapes were stolen from a GPs office in AmeriTrade, Bank of America and Time Warner recovered. each lost backup tapes containing the personal details of a combined total Winchester. of 900,000 people. Lost data, lost business 100 105 A staggering CLOSED 90% 000107 110 Open of companies go out of business within two years O Empty Recycle Bin Create shortcut Rename after suffering a major data loss Properties 88% of UK 28% 160 O00107Y of businesses recognise the need for a faster data businesses suffered some form of data loss in 2010 recovery option Retired tech The floppy disk retired aged 27 Analogue mobile phones retired aged 28 The Walkman retired aged 31 Concorde BetaMax retired aged 27 retired aged 27 Sources: CA Technologies / Star / Storage Magazine / The Risk Digest/The Register/ ComputerWorld UK /Wikipedia / The e-policy Handbook Backup tapes, they've worked hard for 60 years. Isn't it time you retired them? KeepltSafe a j2) Global company

The history of backup tape

shared by BabelPR on Jan 12

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Few would buy a USB stick to backup irreplaceable family photos after discovering that it would fail to restore those treasured memories 77% of the time. Yet, astonishingly,a popular backup method for... UK organisations has exactly this failure rate. The culprit? Tape – a relic of the 1950s,is stilla widely used medium for backing up business critical data.Whether after 60 years it has simply become a habit, or whether staff are just unaware of how unpredictable tape really is, too many firms are risking one of their most valuable assets with an unacceptably unreliable storage format. Yet, its unreliability is just one of the pitfalls of tape.Even if your data can be successfully restored from backup tape, because they operate in a similar way to audio cassettes, it can take hours to wind through to retrieve any particular file.In addition, the portability of backup tape makes it easy to lose, susceptible to theft or easily damaged. Eoin Blacklock, Managing Director at KeepItSafe, points out that since data is such a vital and irreplaceable business asset, organisations need to wake up to the shortcomings of tape and look for alternative data backup solutions before they are caught out.KeepItSafe have come up with an infographic detailing some of the pitfalls of tape – revealing some shocking practices and illustrating some of tape’s worst data loss cases:

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KeepItSafe

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Babel PR