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What Not To Do With Your Data
Tiny Tim writes "Stupidity strikes! A data recovery company has revealed the dumbest data disasters it's confronted this year — including rotting bananas, smelly socks and a university professor's foolhardy application of WD-40."
Nonsense! I once turned a 5400RPM drive into a 7200RPM drive merely by giving it a good squirt of WD-40. I swear!
This guy's the limit!
What's interesting about this story is how easy it might be for *others* to recover your data after you think you've wiped it.
Original ontrack article - Top 10 List of Data Loss Disasters of 2006
The important thing is not to stop questioning --Albert Einstein.
waste of time
The article is a summary of an advert. The original can be found here: http://ontrack.co.uk/special/data-disasters-2006.a spx?hp=Top10_2006
Someone I know had an important data disc that he used with no problems. Everything was going fine until he decided to get a little more educated about computer commands. He read a statement somewhere that said you need to "format discs before you use them." After reading this, he made sure to format the data disc before the next time he tried to access it.
Where were you when the voynix came?
AHhahahahahaha! the perfect corporate sabotage! Disguised as a janitor in a data center, place the banana inside one of the server cases over the holiday weekend, and voila! Muahahahahahahaha......
Although, from people I met over the years, they have a very good reputation for data recovery. At one of the PC Expos in NYC, I remember they had a booth with a computer that was in a fire. They claimed that they were able to retrieve the data.
Freedom is a state of mind. A mind is a state of being. Stay the fuck out of my mind and my being. - Corporate Avenger
Here's a good hard drive one.
That's the reason I always use high-quality, industrial-strength bits in all the code I write.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
This is sort of OT but when i worked at radioshack, this guy was complaining about his keyboard on his laptop not working properly. After looking at the unit I realized that the customer had been hiding a thin layer of pot under the keys... I didn't "inform the authorities," but I did have a long conversation with the guy about where he should hide the pot.
My favorite is still the intern who accidentally typed 'rm -rf / home/user' as root. The machine wasn't very important and the data was restorable from tape but it was still pretty funny to see the look on his face when he realized what he had done.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
This thing is full of really bad puns and reads like an ad for a certian data recovery company. how the hell did this get posted on the front page?
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
I had a guy come to me with a laptop and said it would no "Turn on" so i power it up and his drive is not working, and i take the drive out, and take a good look at it, i put it back into the laptop thinking it must be the BIOS or somthing, the as soon as it powered up, i hear a sound that sounded like broken class in a blender! come to find out the poor think had been droped more then 21 times, he thought it could not harm the laptop, goes to show how dumb people are
Just goes to show that some people really shouldn't touch technology
That "article" is nothing more than a commercial for using their data recovery service.
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
"OnTrack claims it rescued the data in all cases. Jim Reinert, senior director of software and services for the company, said it pays to have your damaged hard drive or storage device evaluated because the chances of recovery are good."
This "slashvertisement" crap has gone too far.
I have a confession to make. I lost my data due to my sheer incompetence.
One late night, I surfed browsed through my government's website to look for some very important information. After about an hour of searching, I finally found a link to the document I needed. I had 5 other browser windows open, pointing to pages I needed. I thought the link would lead to an html page, but it was actually a pdf.
I merrily clicked on the link. Adobe Acrobat opened up inside the web browser. And to my horror, but not to my surprise, Adobe Acrobat crashed. It stalled IE, so I would have to ctrl-alt-delete and lose my 5 other browser windows, not to mention attempt to find the form again.
Out of frustration, I hit my laptop. Really hard. And the hard drive made a funny sound. A last breath kind of sound. Which it probably was.
I lost everything - work item, personal items. A lot. I had not backed up recently either.
Now I use FoxIt reader. And if a program crashes, I try to keep my cool.
The most common issue I've dealt with is jr techs deleting user profiles off xp boxes to "fix" something without first determining if there is any sensitive data in "my documents." Yes, generally -- although we tell users to put important stuff on network drives -- there are docs there that carry weight....
I had a HD going bad once, with stuff on it I HAD to get off. I hooked it up and as it clicked and thumped and stopped spinning, I'd whack it with a flash light. This would make it spin and the copy would continue. After 30 minutes of beating it into submission, all data copied off successfully....
I will tell this: one time we had a fire at a site. After all the damage cleaned up, machines replaced, etc., we were working with the maintenance guy who had been involved in the smoke cleanup, etc. The server was pretty messy. We were going to replace it, but he said, "no problem. Got it working." We asked what he did.
He took the thing apart, apparently, and ran all pieces through the industrial dish washer -- all the but the harddrive. He let dry thoroughly, put all back together, and it worked. We were dumb-founded....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
I like my data to be private, and if I was ever in need of a data recovery company, I would expect them to be professional, and respect my privacy/data.
Here you have a company airing their clients misfortunes all over the net.. and in one case even specifying the name of the individual. Doesn't exactly give me a warm and fuzzy feeling about how well they respect a client's privacy.
I've been wondering how to tag this. It's not a Dupe, it's not a Slashvertisement.. Dupetisement? Duh'tisement? hey.. i like this last one!
ATH++
Thats why I use the Microwaved-Hard-Drive method. It works! Mostly because you can't find the HD amidst the smoldering ruins of the house.
Can we at least *try* to avoid posting false news items that are really nothing more than thinly-disguised press releases?
It always slows things down, and often has idiotic upgrade messages to wade through. Thankfully, Google often offers HTML translations of PDF files it links to. I only wish they offered this for ALL pdf files, instead of just some. PDF for web content is a nuisance to be bypassed.
Where were you when the voynix came?
"Can we at least *try* to avoid posting false news items that are really nothing more than thinly-disguised press releases?"
Can you please cite the false parts of this news item? If you can't, why call it false?
Where were you when the voynix came?
The other day I did: "rm *" without doing "cd otherdirectory" first. Aargh. After some googling, I discovered that it is generally impossible, or at least very difficult, to recover deleted data from a journaling file system in a multi-user environment. I had to reconstruct a week's worth of work because I only back up weekly.
/trash(chmod it 1666) and create a script to replace rm. Have it mv the file to trash so it can be recovered later if you need it. Then just create a cron which empties the trash or another script to do it. Or set an alias to rm to "rm -i" so it ask before you delete the file." It sounds like not a bad idea. On the other hand, the lack of an easy-to-use undelete tool for ext3 and Reiser seems like a bit of an oversight.
Genlee posting on LinuxForums suggests: "I strongly recommend using a journaling filesystem beceause the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. If you have to, create a few scripts to mimick a trash can. Create a dir like
The story summary said at the outset that it is the experiences of a data recovery company regarding data problems on damaged hardware. So what's the problem? It's not like that such a company is not a great source if you are looking to find out actual data loss/recovery anecdotes. Perhaps if you don't like such information, you should configure slashdot so you don't see "hardware" stories.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Not related to data recovery (I guess it is information loss, though). We had a wireless antenna set up that connected our office to the main wireless tower array that provided our wireless access for the town. People start calling saying they "can't get anywhere" (don't you just hate that description?). Anyway, come to find out that either the AP on our building or the bridge on the tower isn't working right.
:P
I go and check the bridge on the tower, and it's fine. I notice the local AP shows no WLAN connection, so I go outside. Now, the AP is on the building behind our building (it's taller); we had rented space to put it there. The owners of the building are an older couple (it's an antique store). I walk into the alley and there's the cable that connects the indoor unit to the tranceiver dangling from the roof, and the guy's up there installing an old TV antenna. Doofus there didn't know "what [this] strange cable was", so he cut it (although he didn't admit it; funny how the cable "cut" itself and was fine until he was up there). So, $80 later it's fixed. We managed to splice the cable back together long enough for the new cable to come in.
We also had a person bring in a PC that wouldn't work. The technician opened the case, and there was a big dead rat in the case. Not a mouse, a rat, nest and all.
I swear, people should have to take a class and get certified to be allowed anywhere near technology.
I don't reply to Anonymous posts; if you have something to say to me, identify yourself or I won't reply.
Yet more reasons to buy a cheap external hard-disk and at LEAST back up to that :-)
:-)
Or, you can be like me and back up to an external hard disk at home, and a filesystem on a RAID array with a hot spare, and another backup system for that array in a different location!
Backup solutions are way cheaper than paying some person to extract data from a dead drive... even for the bare minimum external USB/FireWire drive that you backup to daily, would save probably like 90% of all accidental damage losses of data, or losses due to random drive failure. Go out and set up your backup solution NOW, not tomorrow
I concur that this is a lousy promotional post. Therefore I'd like to make sure everyone knows the trick of putting failed/failing hard drives in the freezer for a few minutes. For reasons unknown to me, it normally gets them running long enough to pull the important data off them. If you're tempted to send a failed drive to a recovery company, try this first.
Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately attributed to ignorance. -Napoleon
The only thing moderately interesting about this was the WD-40 story. The rest of them are pretty commonplace mistakes.
Did it really matter that the socks were dirty? If they'd been clean, it still would have been inadequate packaging. Is a celebrity dropping a laptop more amazing than me dropping a laptop? A leaky shampoo bottle is a top 10 disaster? If the guy had formatted his drive a 1000 times, would it have made data recovery any more difficult? Food in a computer component is newsworthy? This is just an advertising exec's spin on common data loss scenarios. Hooray for crap stories and corporate pandering.
Sorry, my thought process was cut off while posting..
The other point I wanted to make is that we dont know one way or another if these stories were told with permission. So who would I go to with my personal data on a broken hard drive?? Company 1 that is known to blab stories about how their clients lost data (and who may or may not be getting said customers permission)? Or Company 2 who keeps their mouth shut, and just gets the job done.
Mark me down for Company 2.
They recovered data from a drive that was formatted 10 times?
I used to work in a camera store. Although not directly related to losing computer data, the ways customers would destroy their cameras and their film were often quite amusing.
One guy dropped his camera into a lake at the cottage. He had read somewhere that once a camera has been immersed it should not be removed from the water. So he brought us his camera in a bucket full of lake water. I think there was even sand.
Another guy had his film (remember that stuff?) with vacation pictures break in the camera, so he couldn't rewind the roll. He did a very intelligent thing. He went into a pitch dark room, and by feel opened up the camera, took out the film and put it into a film container. Would have worked, except that didn't use one of those black Kodak film containers. Instead he used one of those clear film containers from Fuji. When he proudly brought his "saved" film in for processing, we regretfully had to inform him that despite his best efforts, the film was ruined.
Then there was the lady who didn't understand why her night photos of Niagara Falls (taken with a Kodax Disc camera) didn't turn out, because she distinctly remembered that the flash went off. We had to explain to her that if her flash could illuminate all of the Falls from that distance, it would probably kill everybody within 10 feet of her.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
Giving root access to some intern has to be one of the most bone-headed ideas I have ever heard. root has to be earned.
This idea of appliances and harddrives reminds me of something I once read a few weeks ago. Can anyone confirm that placing a harddrive in a freezer for several hours will allow it to run for long enough to recover data? No, seriously, supposedly the contraction of the platters will sometimes allow a drive to read for 30 minutes or so (until it expands back to normal), just long enough for a data recovery...Can anyone confirm/deny this?
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
This was linked into the most recent thread at thedailywtf, and having just now finished reading it, it obviously deserves to be linked here as well to increase your own morning "gotta read this" time: unix horror stories
And never forget to mount your scratch monkey...
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
What's the problem with journalists these days?
They could at least read the fake article before publishing it... it looks like a fscking ad from a data-recovery company.
Ever notice that railroad tracks tend to have some space between the different segments of rail? Depending on the season, it allows for the metal to expand or contract due to heat. In the winter, the metal tracks will shrink a little bit and contract. In the summer heat, the tracks will expand a bit.
Same thing with a hard drive, if a metallic part is stuck inside, then sometime freezing the sucker will cause the bearing or whatever to schrink just enough that it becomes unjammed. Now if the bearing is screwed, your drive will run into issues once it heats up+expands again. In some cases it will give you extra lifetime your drive, but for any failed drive I'd recommend replacement as soon as the data is recovered sufficiently.
From the 1980s -- I watched a new sysadmin blowing away an old user directory on the college VAX (which had about 600 user accounts):
/usr/users/olduser/* /usr/users/olduser
/usr/users/olduser: directory not empty /usr/users/olduser/.*
# rm -r
# rmdir
# rm -r
Shortly thereafter, the phone started ringing...
(think about it...)
I heard about this one guy who threw his hard drive in a lake from his high-rise apartment. The hard drive sat in the lake there for a while. The guy was later incarcerated, and then broke out a while later. The FBI then fished his hard drive out and were able to recover some data from it. :)
While I found the stories funny, that article was an obvious on-track plant...
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Having worked in IT for a while, I've found that everyone's data is "invaluable" until they find out what the cost of recovery is.
I remember one person's drive that failed badly. Naturally, he hadn't saved his files to the server. All his data was "priceless," of course, until we got a quote from the recovery service that was about $1,000. On second thought, he said, maybe we could just keep the old hard drive around in case we need something off of it, and then we could send it in.
As it turned out, there was never anything important enough to warrant sending it in.
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
A friend gave me an old iMac G4 because the HD (Quantum Fireball 13 GB) was fried. The HD's motor driver chip had a nice burn mark where the chip had spewed it's magic smoke. I yanked the circuit board of a similar HD (Quantum Fireball 10 GB) -- the circuit boards "look" identical -- and the Frankenstein HD worked. My friend got her data back and I got to keep the iMac.
The point is that electronics problems with HDs (but not mechanical problems) can be fixed by swapping circuit boards.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I knew a guy who had roaches so bad that he lost a machine to them.
His machine suddenly stopped working and when he opened it up to take a look, he discovered full of some rather fried roaches.
I guess that would be a lesson to those who eat a little too much in front of their computer...
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
The NSA (and by extension the DoD) does not allow, under any circumstances, the use of wiping software to declassify hard disks. No matter how many passes. They might have at one point but nowadays there are no guarantees with the way storage technology changes so quickly so that they decided it would no longer be a good policy.
Disks can be wiped using a single 0-pass to be re-used for a different project at the same or higher classification level (but different need-to-know).
But disks can never go lower. Than can only be destroyed by melting or shredding. You remove the platters from the drive, send them to Ft. Meade, and they run it through the shedder, and send you a receipt of destruction.
This also applies to flash media (compact flash, USB memory sticks). Same rules.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
...with conv=noerror.
/dev/urandom, not /dev/random. The latter takes forever. /dev/zero so that it's not obvious the disk was securely erased, and that you read 0s (and not random garbage) when a filesystem driver has an error and reads from unallocated space.
dd is probably faster than cat provided you use bs=4k or thereabouts.
Also, use
And you want to follow up with a final
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
LOL ! That gives me an idea - would it be possible to write a Lojack type app, which when triggered remotely and covertly, would stress the power supply and make the batteries explode ?
That would teach a thief to steal laptops. (Or teach a scumbag to buy stolen laptops for that matter)
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Easy DIY project - the write-only disk drive!
Reminds me of the colleague who asked "What is the best program to convert files?"
Answer: "Well, rm converts files into free disk space very efficiently!"
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
DoD grade is complete destruction by an NSA-approved procedure. They remove and shred the platters.
Please don't perpetuate that myth. DoD would rather not deal with issues like unpredictable sector reallocation, varying densities of magnetic domains... it's much simpler (and much faster) to destroy the drive.
Also, many vendors who supply hard drives with equipment on GSA schedule have policies that allow users to keep harddrives from leased machines for destruction, or for sending empty drive shells back for RMA replacement of failed drives.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
They actually have guidelines for core memory :-) and CRT screens, which can leave magnetic signatures.
But uh capicator-based DRAM (and SRAM) is all good, just remove power.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
As long as the platters are bent or even just slightly trashed, you're probably OK. The drive saver guys can't work with those. "Special expertise" is required. Even the "backed over with a truck" scenario requires working with a drive whose head/plater assembly is largely intact, then attaching a new circuit board if the circuit board has been smashed. They can open up the drive and do minimal repairs since they work in a clean room.
A coworker used to have a hardware device (used for testing as well) that would wipe a drive by repeatedly writing patterns, but multiple passes are required and it takes several hours (2 to 5 times what it takes to reformat.) It's cheaper to just take old drives outside and back over them repeatedly with your car until they are completely flat. "Repeatedly" is important to make sure the platters are thoroughly damaged.
If you are worried about whether some entity is going to recover data from your bent platters, well, you probably have your own special set of problems and should be more worried about checking under your car each time you get in, etc.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
I repaired many a hard drive (10, 20, 30 Megabytes with an M) by squirting WD-40 on the bearing. In those days, the bearings were exposed, and did not require opening the case.
Note to self: do not send my disk to OnTrack after doing something stupid. I don't want to end up on the front page of Slashdot.
Well you can't degauss a modern hard disk and then re-use it... so unless you have lots of bulk tape there's no point investing in a degausser since it's essentially free to destroy at the NSA (you just send it in with the rest of your printed material, appropriate labeled in document control, of course).
DSA also recommends not to sanitize and re-use secret-level hard disks anyway because it occurs often enough that projects that were once Secret become Top Secret and then you have to go round up all those disks and destroy them (among other implications if they are out in the open). I'm not getting this from the NISPOM, this is just what some of their guys recommended as best practice and it makes control procedures a bit easier (the paperwork for doing sanitization of media in document control is a bitch).
Also, DSS released that matrix years ago. It's not an official part of the NISPOM, and people like to claim that it is. It's just a guide. DSS and the NSA have the ultimate authority and they approve your operating procedurs. Currently, they'd like you to send the documents (in this case, the disk platters) back to them unless it's confidential/FOUO/SBU, and thus not under control.
For SBU, a 3 pass is just fine. That's the method we use.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Typically your waterproof watch is good to 50ft - which means, you can probably shower with it on. It can handle NO dynamic forces.
Your waterproof watch that's good to 100ft - you can have a bath.
Your waterproof watch that's good to 100m (changing scale) - you can go swimming with. I've even used one for recreational diving (so long as you don't press any buttons you are probably OK).
Your waterproof watch that is good to 300m - that's pretty close to waterproof for all practical means.
If the camera really was billed as a waterproof/resistant camera (suitable for scuba diving and snorkelling), and it was appropriately cared for (it was sealed properly, and the o-rings were greased to the manufacturer's directions) - I'd be tearing the manufacturer a new one.
This is just a shameless plug for OnTrack data recovery. It's of course funny to know what people do to their hard drives and how stupid some people are...
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Repeat after me: WD-40 is not a lubricant; it actually cleans oil off.
Simply let the machine sit for a few hours. I had a laptop go bad like that. I let it sit for a few hours, and was able to get it back up long enough to copy my work over the LAN. It wouldn't have been the end of the world, since backups were weekly, but a few patient hours saved a few days work in this case, and as well as some application data that wasn't normally backed up.
Well you can't degauss a modern hard disk and then re-use it... so unless you have lots of bulk tape there's no point investing in a degausser since it's essentially free to destroy at the NSA
So? I don't get to destroy my data at the NSA. If you'd bothered to read my original post, I was talking about HIPPA protected data. I have no ties to the NSA. So I don't get to have the NSA destroy my data for free. I was talking about destruction up to the level of those of DOD published standards. DSS is part of the DOD. And these were standards published by it.
Also, DSS released that matrix years ago. It's not an official part of the NISPOM, and people like to claim that it is. It's just a guide.
Where exactly did I claim it was part of the "Operating Manual"???
And it certainly was issued as a part of NISP.
"This Manual is issued in accordance with the National Industrial Security Program (NISP). The Manual prescribes requirements, restrictions, and other safeguards that are necessary to prevent unauthorized disclosure of classified information and to control authorized disclosure of classified information released by U.S. Government Executive Branch Departments and Agencies to their contractors. The Manual also prescribes requirements, restrictions, and other safeguards that are necessary to protect special classes of classified information, including Restricted Data, Formerly Restricted Data, intelligence sources and methods information, Sensitive Compartmented Information, and Special Access Program information. These procedures are applicable to licensees, grantees, and certificate holders to the extent legally and practically possible within the constraints of applicable law and the Code of Federal Regulations."
It's just not in the current NISP Operating Manual. The data destruction methods in the current NISPOM are mainly concerned with paper/microfilm. There is no explicit mention of any other storage media in the destruction section.
Explain to me how you can format a hard drive 10 times and still get the information back. That means that my current hard drive has all the information on it from its previous incarnations as a portable drive and a paperweight.
One thing I've noticed when a drive starts crapping out, is that the controller is very important in getting the data off the drive. Case in point: this morning I had a 400Gb drive start whirring loudly, then the server would grind to a halt and go forward for only one second every 30 seconds, although no access was being done on that drive. Moving the drive to a USB enclosure was a failure ("new hardware is connected - wait, no, hardware just disconnected"). And then I tried a PCI controller board. Copied 400Gb in one pass, not a hitch.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Can I get a purchase order number, please?
I had a customer once that left the same TR3 backup tape in the driver for several years. When their hard drive crashed and they really needed the backup, to say it was caked with dust in an understatement. I don't know how OnTrack got the data off of that tape, but my hat is off to them! Cheers!
Send it to these people to recover? If so, you should check your credit card receipts afterwards, and hope there were no other embarrassing moments on your HD..
Or perhaps just skip a step and report your experiences on a blog; instead of wondering why you were stupid enough to do THAT, people will wonder why you were stupid enough to do that and write about it, although at least the experience won't cost you anything extra (well, other than your self-respect, but you weren't going to salvage that anyway).
Yeah, tried the freezer trick (which did work for me once before). No luck. I think the motor in the drive simply died.
The freezer trick is more likely to work in cases where a component on the circuit board of the drive is defective/failing. (Bad components often still function as long as they're cold enough, but quit performing within normal specs when they warm up.)
That's also why the old-time TV repairmen used to carry a spray can of "component cooler" with them. They could temporarily chill individual parts until they found a culprit.
I was talking about HIPPA protected data.
That's twice now. How is it that you've heard of the term but don't know how to spell it? Do you consult for a healthcare organization?
You don't have to melt it - get it above the curie temperature and it isn't ferromagnetic anymore so any magnetic information is lost. It doesn't even have to be for long - an intense enough shock wave gives you enough local heating to do it - so a bullet through the drive may well wipe the entire drive.
To be sure you would have to use a large bullet or put the thing in the oven for long enough for the heat to even out. By doing this you cook the board, explode the capacitors and melt the solder - so a mechanical shredder is probably less hassle and gives you enough microstructural damage that putting the pieces back together again would still give you incomplete maganetic information - shredding would get the parts hot too.
Heh, sorry. It's one of those typo's I just can't seem to break.
In most cases it is just the bearing and shrinking it a bit allows the drive to spin up. Most metals contract if you reduce the temperature.
An extreme example of this that I saw was a 200kg copper piston stuck in a shock tunnel (simulates mach 7 airflow) which was pulled out by drilling a lot of holes in it and pouring in a lot of liquid nitrogen.
The best solution I've seen is a random, 5 pass wipe process, followed by grinding the platters into powder. Knowing the magnetic polarity on a grain of HDD platter is one thing, figuring out the alignment and positional information of it is something else entirely.
The article is not factually untrue per se. But its representation as a news article is deceptive. See definitions 4 and 6.
false (fôls)
adj. falser, falsest
- Contrary to fact or truth: false tales of bravery.
- Deliberately untrue: delivered false testimony under oath.
- Arising from mistaken ideas: false hopes of writing a successful novel.
- Intentionally deceptive: a suitcase with a false bottom; false promises.
- Not keeping faith; treacherous: a false friend.
- Not genuine or real: false teeth; false documents.
- Erected temporarily, as for support during construction.
- Resembling but not accurately or properly designated as such: a false thaw in January; the false dawn peculiar to the tropics.
- Music. Of incorrect pitch.
- Unwise; imprudent: Don't make a false move or I'll shoot.
- Computer Science. Indicating one of two possible values taken by a variable in Boolean logic or a binary device.
adv. In a treacherous or faithless manner: play a person false."false." The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. 16 Nov. 2006.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=false
Yeah - generally the problem with washing off components is the oxidation that will follow in short order. That can of course cause problems later on, but it will work for a quick fix.
Libertas in infinitum
These days, 50 TB is a pretty wuss file system. I'll bet a significant number of /.ers have 50TB in their bedroom file server.
Google, apprently, intends to write all data it encounters, forever, and I bet they have a room full of people whose job it is to buy storage capacity by the Tens of Petabytes, and still it's not enough for their plan for world domination, BWAA HAA HAA HAA!
If you're in between those extremes, you will end up purging old files sooner or later.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"