Ack.  I feel your pain.
(Those are the same people who will argue with you that AES256 encryption
just isn't secure enough.)

But the L word (litigation) trumps everything, as far as I've been able to
determine.

Isn't there an ERASE command that works on the 359x hardware?
You can't access it via TSM, but perhaps you could invoke it from AIX,
creating a very tedious task for operators to use when tapes come back from
the vault.  (But that will only work if you PROMISE not to mention to them
that the dead stuff still exists on tapes in between good stuff that hasn't
expired, and you can retrieve that if you restore your TSM DB back 3 or 4
months whenever they need it....)

For the onsite stuff, tell the people who want the stuff physically erased
that they have to buy you enough SATA disk to store all their email backups,
and set up a TSM file pool with Disk Shredding (that's what it's for).

W






On 2/8/08, Allen S. Rout <asr AT ufl DOT edu> wrote:
>
> >> On Fri, 8 Feb 2008 07:49:11 -0500, Richard Rhodes <
> rrhodes AT FIRSTENERGYCORP DOT COM> said:
>
>
> > Are you talking about "discoverable" meaning the legal term
> > "discovery", or as in "snoopable", meaning somebody gets access to
> > your media because it falls off a truck or they walk out the door
> > with it?
>
> The former. :P
>
> > We have had this conversation with our email folks here.  I have
> > explained that, YES, the previous data is sitting there past the
> > defined deletion period.  YES, it is possible to access it on a very
> > expensive fishing expedition.
>
> I think the problem here is that many people, coming to this question
> fresh, try to set policy without understanding what we (backup admins)
> mean when we say things like "This is expensive", vs. "This is
> difficult" vs. "This is extremely difficult", and what-not.
>
> When I talk about special equipment and gobs of staff time (I don't
> think a stock 3592 will seek beyond logical EOT, will it?)  I seem to
> get feedback that tastes of "Oh, so it's possible, right?".
>
> Yeah, if you want to pay mumblety-thousand dollars to a recovery unit,
> you can get your bitstream back off the end of the tape (singular).
> Put another mumblety-thousand dollars in staff time in, and you can
> probably pick out email-looking stuff.  Is this part of our policy
> response to discovery?  Probably not.
>
> But when someone says to me "This data must not be recoverable, even
> through extraordinary measures", I shudder, and prepare to repel
> boarding by the NSA.
>
>
> - Allen S. Rout
> - Why bother, they already know.
>