Tape Shredding

There are legal and security risks involved with every magnetic tape stored at your facility or at offsite storage facilities. The cost to store these tapes can be significant. Purging and shredding old tapes eliminates your legal electronic data discovery risk, lost data security risks, and storage costs. Because most older tapes are unreadable on current technology, a lot of organizations are storing obsolete tape drives that hold sensitive information that’s hard to retrieve. Tape Drive Shredding eliminates the risk of a data breach associated with lost tape drives.

Our Onsite Tape Shredding Process

Disposing of magnetic tape requires that all recorded data is destroyed and that the data sanitization process meets with both your internal data security needs and regulatory data privacy requirements. Regulatory data privacy regulations require that you follow NIST Special Publication 800-88 “Guidelines for Media Sanitization” NIST approves both tape degaussing and tape drive shredding as acceptable data sanitization methods. 

“Managing legacy data is the most important thing an organization can do to reduce (legal) risk and cost associated with electronic data (discovery).” 
Source: Anne Kershaw, A. Kershaw PC / Attorneys & Consultants 

Our onsite drive destruction team can accommodate your specific needs. While onsite, we can also provide:

• Hard drive shredding
• IT inventory validation
• Degaussing of hard drives and tape drives
• Data center deinstallation and relocation 

Our technicians will advise your team on how to best prepare your assets for destruction and recycling to ensure a fast and seamless experience at our next visit. If needed, we can also leave a container at your location to store your e-waste.

Shredding Onsite or Offsite

The most secure tape shredding takes place at the client’s location. Back Thru The Future’s mobile shred trucks can process 1000+ tapes per hour. 

We can provide both onsite and offsite NIST approved data destruction.  Our vehicles are specially designed as both secure GPS tracked transport vehicles as well as high volume electronic shredding vehicles.

As a US EPA and NJ DEP licensed electronic shredding business and a NAID AAA certified secure data destruction business we have the unique ability to provide both a legally valid environmental compliance certificate as well as legally recognized data destruction certification for your IT Asset disposal projects.

Recycling vs. Shredding

There is no available technology that can recycle used tapes. Recycling of tapes means “Reuse”. The reuse of tapes must require that all of your recorded data be erased prior to resale. There is no 100% effective method of erasing tapes other than degaussing and degaussing destroys a tape drive’s ability to read/write on the tape. Reformatting a degaussed tape is prohibitively expensive. Most tape erasure tools (other than degaussing) use tape overwrite techniques. Tape overwriting will not occur on surface areas of the tape that the recording heads identify as defective. Those areas can retain prior recorded data.