[Dataloss] (update) UT: U. patient records recovered

[Al Mac Wheel]

, Michael Hill, CITRMS wrote:

<snip>


> >    Before this afternoon's news conference, attorney Scot Boyd, who is
> > representing 11 plaintiffs and potentially "hundreds" more in that
> > lawsuit, couldn't say whether the recovery of the tapes would nullify the
> > lawsuit. But in court filings, he wrote that it wouldn't, noting the
> > thieves could copy the information and return the original tapes.
>
>Can you detect whether a tape has been copied?  Can any techies out there
>answer that?

On IBM OS, you can get statistics on backup media # of usages & estimated life.
For example: this media is rated for 1 million usages, and so far it has 
had XX,XXX usages.  I do not know how accurate it is, I have not used it 
for this purpose.  The act of accessing the media to get the latest count, 
that is also a usage.

How I have used it for backup media ... I have a mountain of backup media 
used in rotation.  From time to time some wear out.  I can use this to warn 
me that some media is approaching the end of its useful life span.

Usages includes reading in a copy to any other media, or upload to some 
computer system.  Depending on how the data on the media is organized, you 
can also get at the # usages of various files, libraries, records 
etc.  With backup media, they should all be consistent with ... save / 
verify / restore, except where you know you used that media to restore a 
small volume of problem areas.

A problem with the latter could be that it is a feature of the IBM OS that 
any time stuff is accessed using that OS, certain aspects of the 
description of the objects are incremented by the usage count, but suppose 
the media is accessed by some other OS, that does not have that same 
security feature standard, or suppose the crooks have the geek skills to 
mess with the OS wherever they are operating, to circumvent or turn off 
some of the stuff the OS normally does.

<snip>

Al Macintyre
i/geek
Programmer etc. on IBM Midrange platforms