Wiping / Scrubing Tapes for resale questions

[Colin]

Hi All,

I need to wipe/scrub a whole lot of LTO5 tapes that are currently all part of a TSM 6.3.4 system. I know I can delete the volume data off of them in TSM but that doesn't actually scrub or wipe the tapes securely to my knowledge.

I played around with the Shred option and it seems to only support random access disks?

How does one securely multi-pass wipe an LTO5 tape and have it still be usable? (rules de-gaussing out as far as LTO goes)

The tape library is a Dell ML6030 and does not have any build in method to accomplish this. I have also been looking at possibly trying ITDT from IBM but would rather just do it natively in TSM.

 

[marclant]

I know I can delete the volume data off of them in TSM but that doesn't actually scrub or wipe the tapes securely to my knowledge.

No, it just removes the file metadata from TSM's database and remove the tape from the inventory.

I played around with the Shred option and it seems to only support random access disks?

Correct, that's for a different purpose that what you want to achieve (although similar).

How does one securely multi-pass wipe an LTO5 tape and have it still be usable? (rules de-gaussing out as far as LTO goes)

If you relabel the tapes, you will end up with an EOT (end of tape) marker immediately after the label. So most backup program would see this as an empty tape. However the data would still be on the tape, so while it would be inaccessible to a backup program, the right person with the right resources may be able to recover it. There may be 3rd party tools that will do what you want, but I never researched it. You could also backup garbage data to it to overwrite that is there, but that seems like a lot of work.

Might be important to ask yourself (or your CIO), is the data on these tapes in the wrong hand more costly to the company then the sale of the used tapes? The answer is most probably yes, in which case destroying them may be the best way.

 

[Colin]

Thanks for the reply. I will bring it up in our next meeting and see how they want to proceed. My assumption is they will still want me to wipe the tapes for resale though. In which case if there isn't really a good way to do this in TSM besides writing garbage data to them I will see what I can do using the base Linux OS and the Library itself. I think there is some linux program that I can use to write 0'z to the currently mounted tape. A lot of manual work and honestly not really worth the time but gotta do what you gotta do when it comes down from above.

 

[marclant]

I guess the sale of the tapes will subsidize your salary for your time to overwrite them.