Media Password Protection, can it be broken?

[Sandy_Williams]

I've seen several posts with people speculating as to whether the data on media that has been password protected can be retrieved without the password. Some say no and some say yes, a data recovery could easily retrieve it. Our company is demanding tighter security but I'll never think of this as a secure solution if it can easily be hacked. Does anyone know for sure? Has anyone ever tried and succeeded?

Also....(and this probably sounds like a dumb question)

Say our building burns down (including the servers and tape drive) and I have one tape off-site. If I setup another server and install Backup Exec on this, can I restore my password protected media assuming I know the password? Just wondering if it will only restore onto the same tape drive or backup exec installation as the password was set on?

Thanks

[Rucha_Abhyankar]

Hi Sandy,

Please elaborate why do you wish to hack the password?

There is no use of this option if users could hack this right!!

Currently this "feature" is not available.


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[Ken_Putnam]

The password is written to the Header of the Tape, so unless yo can directly access the tape, you must supply a password to access the data. I've forgotten which product it is, but one fellow found that a 3rd party pro duct that will extract individual mailboxes from a stores backup apparently does no header checking, and just scans the tape looking for an Exchange Backup. As a result his "secure" Exchange data was available without supplying a password!

If your security requirements are strict, you may want to look into getting an application that will encrypt the data as or before it is written to tape.

To your last question, Yes, since the password is in the tape header, as long as you know the password, the data is available on another system running BackupExec (as long the tape drives themselves are compatible, of course)