Backup Central

Hello,

I have to erase/format all data on a few hundred LTO3 tapes because my employer thinks its worthwhile to sell the used media once its been properly wiped.

I have all of the hardware (server, hbas, fiber, drives, and library), but I have no backup software at the moment, and am wondering if this can be done using only the Windows RSM snap-in, or if anyone might be able to recommend open source software that i can use to do this; or even a completely better way to go about this if I'm headed in the wrong direction. I'd appreciate any help.

Best Regards,

JohnnyMac

Is your employer/boss willing to accept the liability if someone, somewhere, manages to recover company data from the tapes?

Of course, if you bulk erase them with a degauss unit the tape is no longer usable as the factory formatting is GONE.

Do the math anyway:

LTO3 cartridge new = $30
LTO3 cartridge used = $10 (?)

So, let's say (somehow) you will get $2000 for the 200 used tapes, if you can sell them as an entire bulk lot - no way would I sell them a few here and a few there.

Without backup software, I'm unsure how you will convince your library to run in an automatic fashion... "manual intervention" will be needed, so let's say that fussing with each tape take 30 minutes of someone's time to load, start a program to overwrite data, unload, etc. - doesn't factor actual wall clock time per tape. How many drives do you have? Can your system write data to all of them simultaneously?

If it were a Unix/Linux box, you could use the "dd" utility to write from /dev/zero (or, more slowly, /dev/random) to the entire tape to wipe data; in Windows land I'm not sure what you would run.

So 200 tapes at 0.5 hours each = 100 hours of work. Now, what do you or the person doing this work get paid? Figure an hourly wage * 1.5 or so ("burdened cost" - includes your benefits).

Example: $15/hr. pay, times 100 hours effor = $1500 times 1.5 = $2250 cost to erase tapes!

And, while they are wiping tapes you/they won't be doing their regular job. Ah, but your boss says "We'll have the intern/secretary do the work!"... can you trust them to do every single tape properly? What if they get lazy/confused and skip a few?

Final analysis: Is it worth spending that amount of time/effort to get a mere $2K for the tapes (actual gain will be nearly $0), and still have that risk of company data being extracted from a tape that wasn't 100% overwritten?

Get a good bulk eraser (i.e. not a cheap hand-held) or pay a data destruction company to do the job.

Goony