back to article This week in storage: Film folk, HDDs, tape and stacks and stacks of dusty data

The storage enterprise trade is simultaneously hoping what happened in Vegas does and doesn't stay there as the news of new products, tech developments, company changes and people moving jobs flooded out of the NAB conference in Nevada. Azure April is the month of the National Association of Broadcasters conference; if you're …

  1. Nate Amsden

    is it secure?

    In the era of API keys and security compromises it seems a lot safer if you actually want to retain that data to store at least a copy of it OFFLINE, where something like a compromised API key(or admin website login) can't be used to magically wipe out all your data. Most people don't realize this for some reason or another.

    Restoring from offline tape(or disk) would often require some human intervention to get the right tape(s) into the tape drive before they could be messed with.

    In just doing a brief web search I see there is a WORM storage provider for Azure but the big catch from what I read on their blog is you have to give them all of your data and access it through their interfaces only, they admit if you had direct access to the azure controls you could bypass all of their controls and wipe out the data. Perhaps there are other solutions I haven't looked too closely but in my own conversations with folks over the years there doesn't appear to be any awareness of this critical shortfall of most cloud storage solutions for archiving data. WORM isn't quite the same thing as offline storage but it's as close of a term as I could come up with to search by.

    Some enterprise storage arrays have similar built in retention stuff, though I've never used any of it. I remember when 3PAR came out with VirtualLock, where you can lock volumes and not even storage admins can bypass the lock preventing you from removing the volume(in most(all?) cases I assume it would be a read only snapshot so you couldn't modify it either). I suspect support could not either, though they could wipe the data by wiping the underlying drives.

    Also don't forget about the bandwidth required to retrieve the data if it is any significant volume. Perhaps there is a cloud->tape/disk service as well which would accelerate that.

    I see some WORM like storage on amazon cloud but the doc implies it is easily overridden if you have admin access to adjust the policies.

    1. Craig Dunwoody

      Re: is it secure?

      I expect that we will see storage-service vendors offering more mechanisms that require extra effort to wipe data intentionally, including some that claim to prevent even the vendor from doing that. Not bad for a vendor when you choose to pay them to keep some data indefinitely. Beyond those mentioned, another example is an "immutability" option from S3-compatible service provider Wasabi (full disclosure: my company sometimes recommends them to clients). Of course, there are plenty of additional things to think about, including UNintentional data wiping/loss/corruption, and long-term continued availability of any individual service offering.

  2. Arthur the cat Silver badge
    Facepalm

    We’re told B2 cloud storage is 320 per cent cheaper than Amazon S3

    What, they pay you 2.2 times the Amazon rate for keeping your data?

    Bloody innumerate marketing types.

  3. Chris Mellor 1

    Sent in by a BBC person

    A little baffled by your comment "It's not likely you'll find much expertise around these days in digitising film reels" in the news roundup this week. How do you think older films make it into broadcast, shiny disc and streaming services?

    The market for motion picture film scanning is robust, with companies like Arri, Digital Vision, DFT, Filmlight, MWA-Nova, Blackmagic and Lasergraphics all currently making high-end (4K and upwards) scanners. There are a lot of companies out there specialising in scanning and remastering motion picture movies, especially as studios realise how much money is to be made from their back-catalogues. Even us paupers in Auntie Beeb still do it. :D

  4. fpx
    Trollface

    Way Ahead of You

    Pretty much all of my legacy stuff is digital by now. Paper to PDF, Music CDs to MP3, Data CDs to ISO, VHS and DVD to MP4, even my old casette tapes. Took me many months of manual labor, though. Now it's all on a local NAS, with a thorough backup regimen to external HDDs, one of them externally stored just in case the house burns down. This data is my life, so I prefer to have it under my control.

    Still undecided on books, though. I'd love to have some of them as PDFs, but there's no good solution to scanning them myself. There's online services, but they are costly.

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