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."

Comments

Privacy aspect

[tomalpha]

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.

Re:Privacy aspect

[tdemark]

I don't think it's the company you have to worry about. It's the person they send your drive to after they refurbish it you should be concerned about.

Re:Privacy aspect

[eggstasy]

Sorry, that just means you eliminated the data on those three specific places. The rest of the platters can still be read, and whole files retrieved. The way data densities are today, even if you shatter a disk into a thousand pieces, a single, 1/1,000th piece of a 300 GB hard drive is still 300 MB... and breaking shit does not demagnetize it.

Re:Privacy aspect

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the original rumor about wiping with zeros not really wiping enough for 3 letter gov't agencies came that there was residual noise left on the sector (or byte, bit?) that could be reinterpreted to get the original value.

I guess since a byte on the drive is not a single physical object but rather several magnetic pieces that are rearragned during writes, that the drive normally only cares about what the average value is, but if you look at the distribution of the pieces for that byte, you can theoretically reconstruct what the previous value was.

If true, then don't wipe with zeros, wipe with differnet random numbers every pass. Wiping with the same number just smoothens the curve, wiping with different numbers every pass increases the noise.

Re:Privacy aspect

[badfish99]

The "overwrite eighty times" stuff comes from some studies done in the days of 1GB drives. Basically, consumer-grade hardware in those days was not making full use of the storage capacity of the disks, and more sophisticated equipment could read information from between the tracks where the data was supposed to be stored.

Drive technology has evolved, and now your disk can store 80 times as much data as in those days, or even more, and there is no longer any wasted space. So the advice about wiping is really out-of-date and useless. But it has passed into folklore, so it still gets done.

Have a google for "Peter Gutmann" if you want to discover the theory behind all this.

Re:Privacy aspect

[networkBoy]

It's all about being harder to use the data.
By the time someone has read and re-constituted the data from a drive that damaged the data is likely already public, out of rev, or obsolete.

It's not like they don't wipe the drive first, it's just that they take the added step of mechanically destroying the drive. It's then off to the recyclers where (I believe) it is, in fact, smelted.
-nB

Re:Privacy aspect

[ajs318]

Changing from FAT16 to FAT32 doesn't overwrite most of the disk. FAT16 and FAT32 are very similar internally, so a drive already formatted as FAT16 just needs to have a FAT32 FAT written to it to make it FAT32.

Windows also has different FAT entries for "freshly formatted" and "deleted files", preferring not to overwrite a deleted file if it can avoid it. When you convert a disk from FAT16 to FAT32, the reformatter actually respects previously deleted files. If there was enough room on the drive to fit all of Windows 98 on there away from the existing Windows 95 installation, then that's what it would have done.

You can't recover genuinely-overwritten data with software. A disk drive is designed so that, as far as anything talking to the drive through the proper interface is concerned, a one which used to be a zero is indistinguible from a one which has always been a one, and a zero which has always been a zero is indistinguible from a zero which used to be a one. But very often, data isn't actually overwritten, because of the way Windows tries not to overwrite old data. Other OSes aren't so recovery-friendly. There was talk a few years ago about being able to recover imperfectly-overwritten data if the head wandered slightly, but today's data densities mean less head wander. And there's more data on a disk nowadays, most of which isn't relevant. If you tried to use magnetic force microscopy, it would take you a very long time -- several years -- to recover the missed data; you probably wouldn't get all of it; and you would not have any clue which bits were the bits you wanted.

I stand by my assertion that one overwrite pass will put any data well out of OnTrack's reach. I haven't got the money to waste proving it, though.

Re:Privacy aspect

[Apocalypse111]

It's all about being harder to use the data.
Absolutly correct. Even without demagnetizing the disk, if you smash it into a zillion pieces then anyone who wants to read from it will be stuck using an electron microscope to read the polarities off the platter fragments - not a fast or inexpensive process.

The best "oh, shit!" solution for immediate, total data destruction is still thermite IMHO. Not only physically destroys the drive, but the heat demagnetizes it as well. Behond that, a couple shotgun slugs will also, in general, render a drive unreadable by *most* means. You can still hypothetically recover data from such a drive, but the expense and effort involved is more than most are willing to put forth.

advert alert

[Anonymous Coward]

waste of time

Ok...

[aliendisaster]

according to a data recovery company that has released a list of the most remarkable cases of data loss witnessed this year.

British comedian Dom Joly, presenter of Trigger Happy TV, thought the joke was on him when he dropped his laptop, damaging a hard drive containing 5,000 photos, 6,000 songs, a book he was writing and all of his newspaper columns.

Is dropping a laptop really that remarkable? I think they are just trying to name drop on this part.

Re:Ok...

[iainl]

No, it's just that they're trumpeting how wonderful dropping a laptop could be toward saving us from being submitted to any more of Joly's dire attempts at humour ever, ever again.

slashvertisement?

[minus_273]

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?

STOP POSTING ADS

[rbanzai]

"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.

Advert for a company NOT to go to..

[mdobossy]

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.

Re:Advert for a company NOT to go to..

[Poltron Inconnu]

I'd highly suspect that they got permission to do so in all cases. The named individual probably even got the service in exchange for the publicity as it mentions they contacted him after reading about his problem in the paper. If there was not a prior agreement then I'm sure there will soon be an article on Slashdot about the lawsuit. Your comment isn't insightful, it's silly. Many companies give away their services or products in exchange for the right to publicize. And considering that your average Joe on the street assumes that a dead drive means all information is lost forever, as the aforementioned comedian did, then I can see why this company would want to shout from the rooftops that their service even exists. People don't look for what they don't know exists. If the company followed your advice their client list would be limited to only technologically adept people and that would rule out the vast majority of people using computers.

Nothing but a press release. Move along.

[amper]

Can we at least *try* to avoid posting false news items that are really nothing more than thinly-disguised press releases?

Re:Just an advertisment

[Anonymous Coward]

And what's worse, it's not even funny!

Re:What is "False" about it?

[idontgno]

I think the fundamentally false premise is that this story is actually news.

However, at least it's interesting. Everyone loves someone else's disaster story.

Is it just me, or is this really lame?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:nonsense!

[thepotoo]

Ladies and gentlemen, we present to you this season's lame Slashdot joke! (Don't worry if you find it funny. It'll lose its charm in about ten or twenty repetitions.)

A guy with a sig like yours has no right to talk ;)

Write-only disk drive?

[wsanders]

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!"

Re:Remote Kaboom ?

[Itsacon]

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 ?

You wouldn't even need to stress the power supply. Just tell the charger-circuit the battery voltage is 2 volts lower than it really is. Any LiIon drive will explode or at least seriously burn out at the next full charge cycle...

You'd need some plastic explosives for NiCad and NiMH batteries though, they're much tougher.