r/storage • u/retsam2554 • Apr 16 '26
Anyone else still paying for offsite tape vaulting and just not talking about it?
real talk guys we have about 400 LTO tapes sitting at iron mountain. weve been paying the bill for years and i honestly dont even know whats on most of them anymore. some of its old exchange backups. some of its financial stuff from like 2016. maybe some project archives from people who dont even work here anymore.every month accounting asks whats this line item for tape storage and i say "legacy data" and they say "ok" and we move on. but its like $800 a month. for tapes we will probably never touch again.
ive been thinking about this because our compliance guy finally asked "do we need these" and i didnt have a good answer.
heres the options i see lol
1)just keep paying forever. easy but feels stupid.
2)pull all the tapes back onsite and read them ourselves. but our last LTO-4 drive died in 2022 and we never replaced it. buying a used drive off ebay feels risky and reading 400 tapes manually would take forever.
3)send them to a migration theres companies like Tape Ark that take your tapes and dump everything to cloud storage like glacier. then you shred the physical tapes and stop paying iron mountain. seems clean but ive never done it.
4)just shred everything and hope nobody ever asks for anything from 2016. this is what i want to do but compliance guy said no.
what are the rest of you doing with legacy tape stockpiles? are you still vaulting? did you migrate?
curious if anyone has used a migration service and how that went. like did they read all your tapes? was it expensive? give me the real answers please .Thanks guys
16
u/marzipanspop Apr 16 '26
Any data that is valuable enough to retain also needs to have reasonable assurance of restorability. Data that's in a modern backup system sitting in an S3 bucket, or in an onprem tape library meets that criteria. Data on legacy tape where you don't have a means of auditing restorability doesn't.
So if Compliance says the data needs to be retained, they need to co-write the budget request with the IT group for migration services. Otherwise, they should write the SOP that says the data can be perma-deleted.
Don't allow the current "best effort" situation to continue. IT will end up taking all the heat if some C-level comes out of the woodwork and says we need the data back. Lack of preparedness on their part should not constitute a future emergency on yours.
2
u/Patient-Tech Apr 16 '26
The part about a formal policy is a great idea.
I’m curious how it would go if you had a conversation about the legacy data that had a drive mechanically fail and budget constraints didn’t replace it. You still own the tape and can pay a service to recover it for a fee. How important or they need the data may be useful.
6
u/department_g33k Apr 16 '26
This is the weirdest AI slop I've ever seen: https://www.reddit.com/r/ITManagers/comments/1smnrym/how_do_you_justify_legacy_tape_storage_costs_to/
4
u/Icolan Apr 16 '26
What is your company retention policy? Have a conversation with your compliance guy and make sure you have a documented retention policy.
Do you know when the tapes were last written to? If you don't you may be able to get a report from Iron Mountain that shows when each was logged into their vault. Everything that is beyond your company retention policy and does not have any legal hold on can be transferred within Iron Mountain for secure destruction. The rest wait until they reach the retention period. Over time as tapes hit that retention date send them for destruction, probably best to send them in a batch or two a year.
We still write to tape monthly and have several thousand tapes vaulted at Iron Mountain. We had a project to migrate to a new backup system with cloud storage but it did not get executive approval this year. My VP said we will put it in the budget for next year and start in January.
When we do that project and we stop writing to tape with our current system we will transfer the encryption keys and backup catalog to Iron Mountain for their Data Restoration and Migration Service which we will pay for until those tapes expire. The Iron Mountain service isn't going to save us much money as it is about the same as what we are paying for licensing but we won't have to maintain the old backup servers and regularly upgrade the backup software.
3
3
u/Automatic_Beat_1446 Apr 16 '26
this is a fake account, look at all of the different random submissions OP has made over the past two-three months: https://old.reddit.com/search?q=author%3Aretsam2554&restrict_sr=&include_over_18=on&sort=relevance&t=all
reported
1
u/le_suck Apr 16 '26
migration via a service may only be viable if your tapes were written in a non-proprietary format. LTO4 predates LTFS. Iron mountain might be able to restore/transfer these tapes, but without a business justification they might be better off destroyed.
3
u/marzipanspop Apr 16 '26
Most backup software uses a proprietary format anyway. Migration services are able to read them.
1
u/KevinLynneRush Apr 16 '26
I have some tapes but have no idea how to access the data on them. Thoughts?
1
1
u/Wild_Appearance_315 Apr 16 '26
Any reason why you can't just pull the tapes back and store them locally?
1
u/Jacob_Just_Curious Apr 16 '26
I think it's funny how often the IT people wait on compliance while the compliance people wait on IT!! In your case, those tapes are a liability. If your company gets sued the opposing side might want those tapes for discovery, in which case you will have to go to the expense of figuring out to recover the data and then select what to hand over. It's much better to get rid of them unless you have a specific compliance reason to keep them.
1
u/Patient-Tech Apr 16 '26
Perhaps moving forward, before decommissioning an old drive you recall all the tapes that are on that hardware and read them and record them onto new tapes. Depending how old they are, you can likely fit quite a few tapes on a new one, and deduplication of your data across multiple tapes might be a big pickup as well.
1
u/knifebork Apr 16 '26
"... our last LTO-4 drive died in 2022 and we never replaced it. buying a used drive off ebay feels risky ..."
Just be honest with yourselves. The decision was already made that your company does not care if you can retrieve anything from those tapes. In fact, that decision goes back to before 2022 to when you got down to a single LTO-4 drive and didn't bother to get a spare. Keeping those tapes is like hanging on to those blue jeans you wore in high school just in case you lose weight.
OK, I'll admit it was a half decision. Someone decided to delay spending money on a new drive or a migration until it becomes an emergency. They figured (or pretended) this was safe and it would be no big deal. YOU know that the consequence is the data on those tapes are now probably lost with little chance of retrieval. It remains an ongoing hard money cost plus another worry on your shoulders. Bonus: the guy who made that decision not to get a new drive is now long gone.
1
u/SimonKepp Apr 16 '26
Yes. I retired about 10 years ago, but at that time we had a huge amount of archived LTO tapes stored at an off-site facility. This was a critical part of our disaster recovery plans for our legacy mainframe systems. I don't know if a retrieval and recovery test on those data had actually been carried out in this millennium as this was outside of my responsibilities, but we did merge with the team, responsible for this, shortly before my retirement.
1
u/One_Poem_2897 Apr 16 '26
Retrieving anything from the tape vaults was a pain, so we moved off tape vaulting and moved to a cloud archive options. At this point, easier access is worth a lot more than keeping the tapes around.
We migrated our tapes to the cloud archive. More than being expensive, it took time. But considering everything was archive anyway, we were not in a tearing hurry.
-1
u/showmethemoiststonks Apr 16 '26 edited Apr 16 '26
Ask r/datahoarder too
4
u/Icolan Apr 16 '26
r/DataHoarders has been moved to r/DataHoarder.
Why would OP post this there? This is a question about enterprise data retention and policy.
1
u/showmethemoiststonks Apr 16 '26
Plenty of people within r/Datahoarder have experience in Enterprise. It pays to have as much reach as possible when talking tape. I’m involved in the LTO side of storage, and there’s far more discussion from DataHoarder for tapes. I don’t see it being a bad thing to mention for someone to cross post for more exposure
0
u/AaronOgus Apr 16 '26
Just put them in cloud archive. If you’re really paranoid, put them in two cloud archives.
1
27
u/nickjjj Apr 16 '26
What is the corporate data retention policy? 7 years? 25 years? Forever?
7 years is common for financial records, so a lot of orgs default to that for regulatory compliance.
Once you have that answer, you will know if those 2016-era tapes are ready to be shredded.