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Is it even possible to delete something from the middle of a tape (assuming tape backups are used)? The only thing that can be done is to read the tape in, tra
by derekp7 7y ago
Is it even possible to delete something from the middle of a tape (assuming tape backups are used)? The only thing that can be done is to read the tape in, transfer all "good" data to another tape, then erase the original tape.
- Silhouette 7y agoThat's the sort of question that makes the GDPR regrettably ambiguous. It uses a lot of words like "legitimate", "undue" and "reasonable", but there could be genuine uncertainty about how those would apply in quite a lot of practical, everyday situations. In this situation, however, we are talking about an organisation whose entire business model is built on personal data given by literally billions of people over a period of many years, with tens of thousands of employees and tens of billions in revenues, which is operating on a scale where it is demonstrably capable of designing and building replacements to its own specifications for standard infrastructure and deploying them throughout its own data centres. I don't think it would have much credibility if it claimed it couldn't guarantee to comply sooner than three months after a request because it regularly backs up possibly the largest database in the world on magnetic tape.
- jkaplowitz 7y agoIn a conceptual rather than literal sense, yes it's possible to do this in certain cases. In particular, if the per-account bits of the backups are encrypted with per-account keys, deleting an account's key makes that account's bits of the backups unrecoverable.
- cameronbrown 7y agoI believe Facebook uses Blu-rays and regular HDDs for cold storage, not tape. https://datacenterfrontier.com/inside-facebooks-blu-ray-cold-storage-data-center/ https://datacenterfrontier.com/inside-facebooks-blu-ray-cold...