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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!
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......
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.
Yeah - a chainsaw, a garbage compacter and a wood chipper. And a rocket to launch the fragments into space.
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.
I don't know how effective this is, but it's how I discard an old HDD, and it's fun! 1. Dismantle (sometimes hard to do) 2. Scrape platters with wire-gauze 3. Put drive plates in a fire for a few minutes, enough to warp a little 4. Randomly punish - skate on concrete, etc 5. Place in water, for a few months (toilet tank) 6. Discard
Oh.
You put your hd in the toilet? Are you hoping to make next years list?
Monstar L
Yes. I call it "thermite".
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
With very, very long drill bits.
"But this one goes to 11!"
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.
They don't. Instead they just use Sony's batteries. Takes care of both data and thief in one blow.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Ah, the old read mail, real fast routine. Love it...
We frequently use a heavy duty degausser for real wiping, but it also destroys the drive. But sometimes we get creative.
We had 40 gateways that just as the warranty expired started failing like clockwork. 6 out of 40 in the first month or two after it expired so we fought with them and got a free warranty extension on them. One of the hard drives that failed on us had to be sent back for replacement...so our boss told us to make sure that the data was gone and do it "however you want". So after running a data wiping tool writing a pattern to the drive X times, we took it out and proceded to use a jackhammer on it. We tried to pick up as many pieces as we could...some were quite small since it was a laptop drive...and we packed it up nice and neat in its little antistatic bag and sent it back to the company in bits.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
And then, this other time, there was this other computer, and, like, something really bad had happened to it, and, like, they said they retrieved that data too ... it was awesome....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
Well, that you can recover data doesn't mean you can reliably recover it, or do it fast. Hence no 40TB drives.
.1; the old value leaks in a bit. When combined with the error correction codes built in to the drive, you stand a decent chance of recovering the overwritten data (slowly, with special read heads/drive electronics, and somewhat error prone). If you overwrite with the same fixed pattern repeatedly, you really don't improve the situation much (diminishing returns on removing the residual bit), so an 80x "wipe" of all zeros may be recoverable (although 80x is a bit much, even for all zeros). But overwriting to DoD spec is probably sufficient in this case, though. So is beating up the physical platters.
.1 thing works better. But it is far too expensive to bother with in most cases.
d ings/sec96/full_papers/gutmann/
As for how, the short version is that if you write a one and then a zero, you end up with
For the really determined attacker, then can use high resolution magnetic force microscopy (MFM). See, when you overwrite, the write head doesn't exactly line up with the old stuff--so you'll have little bits of the old data sticking out from above or below the track. MFM can resolve very localized magnetic fields, far smaller than your disk read head, and can see the misalignment. These misaligned pieces allow peaking back a few generations of overwrite, which allows you to subtract out the newer things (and hence clarify the older). Plus, it doesn't use rapidly spinning the disk, so it can work on beat up platters. Even without misalignment in the generations of overwrite, good MFM can resolve better analog detail as well, so the whole 1 then 0 =
A detailed technical paper about the theory of data destruction/recovery on magnetic media can be found here: http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/procee
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.
"I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious." - Albert Einstein