Tape Won’t Work for Ransomware Protection

This post has big problems.

All of the author's reasoning implies keeping backups in tape robot. I am going to bet that most small and medium businesses do not own tape robots, instead they own a few drives for which they change the tapes manually. And most of the standard backup rotation schedules (like GFS, Tower of Hanoi or even FIFO) keep most of the tapes offline, far out of reach of any sort of remote access.

And the whole "cost" section is just absolutely wrong. Author has confused tape drive ($3500) with tape cartridge ($75), and made completely wrong conclusions about cost. The tapes are actually much cheaper than the hard drives when you have enough of them.

As far as disk system, the author seems has this weird idea about keeping the disk connecting but disabling access by turning off switch ports, powering off, etc... Not only this will likely need to be custom designed (I have not heard of ready-made systems like this), but somehow, according to author, the hackers will figure out how to attack the libraries, but won't be able to figure out how to re-enable the NAS access?

And of course one could make argument against the tape -- use your good old GFS backup strategy, but with removable drives instead of tape. One could discuss the cost/speed/operator time vs amount of data stored. Or maybe discuss special write-only NAS with separate security credentials? Sadly, this post contains none of that, just some mostly wrong arguments.

Also on slashdot :

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/21/09/19/2220252/whats-t...

Wouldn't it make more sense to use a write-only medium like DVDs? You can't corrupt a DVD once it is written. I am surprised they don't off write-only tapes.

Last I knew, Iron Mountain had disk-based, air-gapped backup as well; these folks aren’t stupid.