"Fujifilm highlights the ability to air-gap tape cartridges as a last defense for user data: “Given the sophistication of cyberattacks, magnetic tape is attracting increasing attention as a means of protecting data from threats such as ransomware.”"
I mean, it's plausible, yet I find it hard to believe this solely drives demand 5 times. Because if it does then what, companies were not using cold storage backups before?
> I mean, it's plausible, yet I find it hard to believe this solely drives demand 5 times. Because if it does then what, companies were not using cold storage backups before?
As someone in HPC: people never delete stuff. It can stick around forever, and so if more bits are generated, there are more bits that people don't want to delete "just in case". Depending on the organization, quota enforcement can be tighter or looser.
HSM is fairly popular in the HPC space for this reason:
Your newest/hottest bits are on NVMe, anything older than (e.g.) 3 months gets move to SSD, anything older than that to spinning rust HDDs, and then to tape.
There are several file systems where this happens in the background: the file still shows up at /path/for/stuff/foo.txt but the contents are shuffled about behind the scenes.
To back this up, even if the dataset is "live" unless someone has specifically made it read only, it will change. Those changes need to be stored and versioned over time.
Filesystems vary, a lot have COW, but that doesn't mean that you can export those changes as neat changesets for fast recovery. Sometimes rebuilding the filesystem from changes is more time-consuming than pointing to an older copy thats on the nearline.
Where I worked, we had a jumping off point that made the master folder arrangement, which then pointed to different folders on different servers. It meant that broken servers only affected those folders. It also meant the largest file you could have was ~120tb.
Each server was dumped to the nearline, which was a lustre cluster. The lustre cluster then drained into a tape library. This meant that we could keep about 1.5 PB "fast" with daily backups rotating into weekly drive dumps. Then when a project was finished we pruned from the nearline and the extra copies in the library.
At least they have a process. That gives you a chance. Often the process itself is good - you didn't test it but the vendors all did and so the data is there - it might be hard to restore, but it can be done by experts after the fact. The drill means you can recover in a "short time" instead of a "long time" (short time can range from minutes to days, while long time days to years)
I've ran drills with companies which concluded that the incremental backups couldn't be restored due to some data corruption issue (no readback test was ever done).
Luckily the company also did a full backup every 6 months, so a disaster would have only thrown them back 6 months at max! /s ;)
But yes, some issues were even more simple: I had a case where performing a restore required twice the storage size of the uncompressed data, and the company actually didn't have the infrastructure ready to do that in case of a disaster...
I'll bet that if it really was important you could pay someone (LLMs make this easier) to dig through the data byte by byte and get everything back despite the corruption. It would take years, and be very expensive, but typically there is enough redundancy to figure it out. Often you only really need a small subset of the data and can live without the rest.
Don't get me wrong, drills are important! You should do them. However backups without a restore drill better than no backups at all. Even if you only get the last full backup, the data from the last 6 months will be the easiest to recreate from scratch if you must.
It's a total loss only for people that were too cheap to pay for multi-regional data storage. Most people balk at monthly S3 fees, so willingly paying double the cost is a non-starter for those led by the bean counters. Disaster recovery is a known thing that should not be blamed on the loss of a single data center in a stupid war. AWS even has automation of duplicating selected data to another region.
I mean, it's plausible, yet I find it hard to believe this solely drives demand 5 times. Because if it does then what, companies were not using cold storage backups before?