Early in my career I worked as a midnight computer operator for AirFone, Inc. I was there right at the time they started up the RailFone and through the financial troubles which resulted in them becoming GTE AirFone in 1986. Of course, you all know that GTE eventually was consumed by Verizon (NYSE:VZ) and more recently was purchased by JetBlue Airways (Nasdaq:JBLU). Some of the former employees have even started referring to this company as Jason due to the fact that no matter how many times it gets killed off it keeps coming back.
As with any computer room operations staff of the day, we would take the backup tapes designated for off-site storage and put them into a big plastic shipping bin with paperwork for Iron Mountain (NYSE:IRM) or whoever would give us credit until GTE started paying the bills. Year end backups always had “Keep Forever” checked with their paperwork. First we were sending off 2400 foot 1600 bpi mag reels. Then we went to 6250 bpi. I was gone before they switched to DEC’s (Digital Equipment Corporation) TK series tape drives. Now, if they even have tape, I imagine it would be DDS cassette.
During my consulting years, I worked at a lot of other companies which had similar backup policies. Most of them had TK or some other cartridge tape, then they switched to removable hard drives when they switched their disk storage to some kind of SAN technology. In any case, they all had the same “Keep Forever” policy with year end and certain financial report backup media.
This came to a head for me the other day. I still have a couple boxes of 5 1/4 floppies with stuff I’ve been meaning to get off, but never took the time. There was never any pressure because I always had an old machine around somewhere that still had a working 5 1/4 floppy. The motherboard in that last machine finally died. “No problem” I thought. I’ll install the 5 1/4 floppy in my ASUS (TWSE: 2357) (LSE: ASKD) based desktop and finally get around to copying things off. “The machine already has a 3.5 inch floppy so this should be simple” I thought.
Naturally, I installed the drive, hooked up all of the cables THEN looked at the BIOS. You betcha. A 5 1/4 drive was no longer an option. The CMOS stamp which comes up during boot says this mother board was built in 2007, so I wonder just how long ago ASUS dropped the support? It’s not a big deal. I don’t need anything on those floppies, it was just one of those things I was going to do one of those days.
That got me to thinking about the real issue though. Just how much of that stuff flagged “Keep Forever” at Iron Mountain (or any other off-site storage service) is worthless? According to some, magnetic tape is good from 10-30 years. I would hate to be a corporation targeted by the EPA or other agency for criminal violations they claim have a 30 year history only to find out my backups were on 10 year tapes because they were cheaper at the time of purchase. During the hey day of Netware servers I had a lot of clients sending backups off on 10 and 20 Meg Bernoulli cartridges (NYSE:IOM). Good luck even finding a drive which an load those things.
Most corporations are required by SOX and investors to create a BRP (Business Recovery Plan sometimes referred to as a Business Continuity Plan but they aren’t really the same), but the bulk of those plans are never physically tested. The SEC needs to start imposing 7 year backup testing since that is the normal default for audits. Why? When you as a corporation switched from tape to removable SAN drives, then sold your tape drive, you invalidated all of your prior backups. You “assume” you can obtain another such drive, but, even if you do, your disk topology has changed so much you couldn’t physically restore it on a bet.
SAN users are not immune. Every so many years companies replace their SAN which changes the drives. Most SANs using 36Gig SCSI drives won’t let you stuff an 18Gig in easily. If you recently moved from a SCSI SAN to a SATA SAN you have the same problem.
While you are thinking about this, think about what you are going to do with all of that other unreadable/unrestorable media you flagged “Keep Forever” and are still paying storage on.
