But this press release from Imation was timed to coincide with Halloween week and is meant to scare people out of reselling their no-longer needed backup tapes to services that re-certify them and resell them. The motivation is so transparent this press release belongs right up there with this one, which is too macabre to even discuss. Imation, of course, is a manufacturer of brand spanking new tapes that are much better than those risky dirty old used ones. DarkReading picked up on the press release, but failed to see the self serving aspects of a tape manufacturer discovering data leakage issues with recycled tapes.
Sorry, I am not buying it. Backup and recovery are an essential IT function . The solution to the issue that Imation raises is to encrypt your data when you back it up. Not easy, but there are so many reasons for encrypting data at rest that this is just one more benefit. And then you can safely wipe your tapes and sell them to a remanufacturer.
I do like physical destruction of media. But not when there is an alternative that saves you money, especially when following best practices of data storage and erasure is better than wasting perfectly good physical media.
