In a nutshell: If you’re a minimum of as outdated as me, you would possibly bear in mind again to the times when magnetic tape was the one possibility for pc storage. Those recollections will not be fond ones for me — having to attend an hour to load up a online game was not enjoyable. However, tape storage has not gone away. In truth, it’s seeing a surge thanks partially to ransomware.
Hard disk drives (HDD) changed magnetic media a long time in the past due to their velocity, and now solid-state drives (SSD) are poised to supplant HDDs for exactly the identical motive. However, Linear Tape-Open (LTO) gadgets, which got here out within the Nineteen Nineties, are nonetheless in use by many corporations.
Today, LTO drives are primarily used as a backup storage resolution as a result of they’re far too gradual for anything. A typical use case is to start out a backup on the finish of the workday, and it completes after a number of hours in a single day. Keep in thoughts these LTO cassettes are nothing like the traditional Commodore cassette drive out of your childhood. The newest LTO 9 cartridges can maintain as much as 45TB.
Interestingly, final yr, LTO options noticed a record-breaking surge in gross sales, with corporations like HP, IBM, and Quantum reporting greater than 148 exabytes of tape having offered. Sweclockers notes it as a 41-percent enhance over 2020 and a 30-percent spike over the earlier gross sales report of 114 exabytes offered in 2019 (above).
The Swedish outlet contends that the rise in magnetic media gross sales is partly as a result of enhance in ransomware assaults. Using LTO drives creates an “air hole” in storage as a result of the machine is offline and, in my expertise, usually off-site.
So the one manner an attacker may destroy an organization’s information fully could be to bodily break into the place the LTO is saved and both copy or delete the information off of quite a few cassettes — a course of that will take far too lengthy to be sensible.
However, LTO will not be supposed as a major backup resolution. Restoring from the drives is simply as time-consuming. It additionally doesn’t shield from assaults threatening to launch or promote an organization’s information. Tape can retailer huge quantities of data and sit on a shelf for years. Storing it off-site additionally protects information from being misplaced to a fireplace or pure catastrophe.
