When crafting your tape backup/archive strategy, you’ll specify retention times — and ideally, you’ll also establish a strategy for the end-of-life (EOL) phase.  

No storage device lasts forever, and tapes are not an exception. Over time, you’ll need to upgrade to modern formats (such as LTO-9), and depending on usage patterns and storage conditions, you may make the decision to retire media much earlier than its rated operating lifespan. 

A qualified tape partner can help you retain essential data, migrate formats, sanitize media, and limit your systems’ footprint. Contact us to discuss your strategy or read on to learn key considerations that impact the EOL phase. 

1. Start with a case-appropriate retention strategy.

Organizations should align their practices with industry standards and comply with legal and regulatory requirements for data retention. 

But “industry standards” isn’t always a perfect rule of thumb — you can’t always look at competitors’ practices to define retention periods, and regulatory requirements sometimes leave room for interpretation. 

Ideally, your retention period will be long enough to cover any potential circumstances that would necessitate a backup/archive. That includes electronic discovery requests. However, an excessive retention period will lead to greater costs. 

Ask questions:

• How does my backup software manage retention? 
• Do I have a strategy for checking older archives to ensure that the retention policy is being followed? 
• For longer retention periods, do I have a migration strategy for handling archived data on legacy media formats? 

2. Understand how backup methods affect retention requirements.

Certain backup methods can minimize media requirements, but there’s always a cost. For example, incremental backup strategies establish a full copy of the target data, then perform incremental backups from that point in time, reducing the overall storage space required for the backup. 

But these strategies have different retention requirements than full-disk backups. Generally, it’s advisable to set retention periods for twice as long for incremental backups; you’ll also need to check the archived data occasionally to ensure that it will still be accessible when needed.

3. Don’t assign massive media sanitization work to a limited IT staff.

When the time comes to retire your tapes, you’ll need to sanitize the media appropriately. Typically, this means using NIST’s Special Publication 800-88 (PDF).

At scale, compliant tape destruction can be time consuming, particularly when your IT staff are already overwhelmed with other EOL projects (such as migration). Handling the work in-house can create issues:

• Some sanitization techniques require technical knowledge. Degaussing, for example, is secure — but only when media is appropriately oriented on a powerful degausser. 
• Media sanitization procedures must be verified, which requires access to legacy hardware and backup software. 
• In many cases, accurate documentation must be kept to show how and when the media (and data) was sanitized. 

Total Data Migration provides comprehensive solutions for EOL tape projects. From migration and catalog ingestion to secure sanitization, we help organizations create secure, compliant strategies — while limiting strain on IT departments for an optimal return on investment. 

 Call us today at (800) 460-7599 or contact us online to get started.