Posts Tagged ‘Tape recovery’
TK50 data recovery, look out for media degradation
August 24th, 2009 | Author: Mark
TK50 was a major player in tape backup on VAX/VMS systems several years ago. Being fundamentally ½” (half inch) tape of the type used in open reel drives, but housed as DLT style cartridge, it suffers from the same long term storage problems as some brands of 1/2″ media. TK50 drives could store 70MB of data, and took quite a long time to fill, so have long since ceased to be a viable backup option even if you can find drives and media. But, there are a surprising number of tapes out there with data on them and recent weeks seem to have brought forth a flurry of requests to get data from them, and in one case to copy some. In a high proportion of these cases the data transfer operation has ended up being a data recovery exercise involving considerable work in the lab.
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eDiscovery and the monster in the vault
August 4th, 2009 | Author: Mark
Past failure cannot be taken as a signpost for the way things will be in the future, so the inability of the US and UK financial regulatory authorities to spot the credit bubble from 20 paces, or the world’s largest Ponzi scheme even when pointed out to them in neon lighting, should not be taken as a sign that regulation can be ignored.
What is almost certain is that these regulatory paper tigers are about to be forced to become real, and with it will come new zeal for enforcing regulatory compliance leading to an increase in eDiscovery and eDisclosure requests.
Computer Forensics – don’t ignore the tapes
July 23rd, 2009 | Author: Mark
Much Computer Forensic work is associated with data recovery from hard disk drives, USB pens and other common data storage media. Even the television drama departments appear to believe that data is stored only on this limited range of media, I don’t have a back catalogue to check against but I am pretty certain that on Spooks there has never been an analysis of a DLT or LTO tape cartridge. So what about tape? Probably the largest volume of data stored in the world is on tape, so is it of any value in forensic investigations and litigation work?
The hard disk drive in a computer system contains the most up-to date information along with other forensically valuable information such as internet history and local temporary files, so why should you bother looking at the backup tapes?
Data Recovery when everything fails
July 8th, 2009 | Author: Mark
Much data recovery work involves the salvage of data from one specific type of storage, a hard drive, RAID array, backup tape or DVD. Occasionally a requirement pops up that transcends this norm.
Having faithfully adhered to a regime of nightly backup of a SUN UNIX system, the failure of the hard drive appeared to be an inconvenience that would soon be overcome for this customer. The hard drive having swiftly been replaced, the backup tape was brought back from storage and the restore process initiated. Five minutes in, however, and the DLT drive made a nasty noise, the cleaning lights came on and ufsrestore became ufs-cannot-restore.
What future has tape data storage?
June 29th, 2009 | Author: Mark
With the volume of data being stored doubling every 18 months, and the possibility of increased regulation in the financial sector following the recent debacle possibly tightening all areas including data retention and data availability, how best to secure data for the long term?
In our data recovery business we are seeing an increase in hard drive recovery work from disk based backup systems. “We don’t use tape anymore” being the gist of many a statement on the subject of backup strategy, “disk based systems are so much more easy to use, and recovering the data is less arduous”. This much is true, disk based storage systems can be on-line permanently, de-duplication can be used to reduce the volume of extraneous data, and down time caused by accidental file deletion or local system failure can be kept to a minimum.
