[iqwesnuv] WORM media

Two data storage media that physically enforce Write Once Read Many are Paper and CD-ROMs.

Neither do well for data that arrives only a few bytes at a time, and we wish to immediately commit those bytes to storage.  CD-ROMs can be multisession, but the overhead is huge to store just a few bytes per session.  Old school text-only dot-matrix form-feed printers could print one line or even a few characters at a time, but nowadays laser printers seem to work strictly one page at a time.  Even inkjets are designed to print rasterized images, so will get confused if the height of the a line of text does not line up nicely with the ink head.

Is there a demand for another technology to fill this niche?  Ticker tapes?

What exactly is the use case for WORM media?  It is actually of only limited effectiveness against an adversary seeking to destroy or alter the data: the adversary could physically attack and steal the stored data, possibly surreptitiously replacing it with the rewritten version.

Another use case might be to prevent accidental destruction of data.  In which case, the WORM-simulating device could simply be a read-write medium (e.g., a hard drive) protected by hardware or software mechanisms to prevent accidental erasure.  Is there such software, say, for within the walled garden of Linux?  Perhaps mark a file, directory, or partition as WORM so that not even root can alter or delete easily.  (Perhaps root has to first run a special utility to change the mode from WORM to read-write.)  We would like deeper operating system support to prevent even dd'ing the partition directly.