Another Masterful Gambit: DOGE Moves From Secure, Reliable Tape Archives to Hackable Digital Records [View all]

Source: 404 Media

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced Monday that the General Services Administration converted 14,000 magnetic to digital records, and claimed the process saved a million dollars a year.

The problem is, magnetic tapes are regarded by storage and archivist professionals as being a stable, reliable, and safe medium for long-term data storage. Just because it’s a 70 year old medium doesn’t mean those records needed a massive overhaul to digital, that it will save any money in the long term, or that the new storage method is better.

Casual storage enjoyers might hear tape and think fragile spools of plastic that can rot or wear out. But digital storage is not necessarily a better option if you’re trying to keep information for years; digital storage rot, or “bit rot,” can affect a hard drive over years of storage, making the data corrupt or inaccessible. This happens when the electrical charge inside a solid-state storage device—like the kind of digital drive we can assume DOGE is talking about—leaks and causes the drive to lose performance.

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But perhaps most importantly, tape is a lot more secure than digital storage. Hackers can’t access what’s on a magnetic tape unless they have it physically in hand; digital storage, however, can be broken into remotely or accessed if it touches cloud storage at all.

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Read more: https://www.404media.co/doge-gsa-magnetic-tape-archives-digital-storage/

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Especially convenient if the government data you found on tape doesn't match the narrative you want... Wonder how fast they've been destroying those tapes?