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

Commonly

[Himring]

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....

Re:Commonly

[Lumpy]

I got a free laptop and a free $900.00 Universal MX-3000 remote that way. Both were damaged by smoke in a fire. they were being tossed at a clients home I snagged them and soaked both in distilled water for days, finally ended spraying down the boards, drying and then reassembling.

Both work great, in fact the laptop has been running fine for 6 months now with my daughter using it. (It's a super slow Dell latitude C640 good for a kid only wanting to run simple games like UT2004 or DOOM3)

Washing electronics is not surprising. everything you own has been washed once in it's life, typically during the assembly.. they wash off all the flux from the soldering process, typically with water if the place uses modern water soluble flux.

Re:Privacy aspect

[networkBoy]

When a drive is to be re-used within the company I work for we do a "secure erase" using a utility IT has blessed. If a drive is to leave the company it is wiped with the assistance of a 1/4" drill bit through the platters in at least three places.

A hard drive is cheap. Company data (or potentially incriminating data for those of us at home) is not.
-nB

Re:Privacy aspect

[Mawbid]

Heh, yeah. I remember when my company bought a hard drive (sold as new, not refurbished) with an ntfs partition on it and a whole lot of personal data. There were pictures of a father and his baby taking a bath. Awww, isn't that sweet?.

I'm pretty sure the person who turned the disk in, if they thought about it at all, assumed that surely the shop would wipe the disk before reselling it. Well, clearly that's not something you can count on.

Re:The freezer method?

[binner1]

I have actually done this. My previous employer has some Building Automation software running on a machine that was not backed up what-so-ever. We were in the process of building a replacement box and getting it all setup, etc. Only days before being able to move the data across (the new system was being backed up), the drive crapped out. A morning in the freezer and we were able to get the data off.

I wouldn't have thought to try this, but a few of the maintenance guys suggested it. I was both surprised and happy that morning!

-Ben

Re:Privacy aspect

[HomelessInLaJolla]

> As for how, the short version is that if you write a one and then a zero, you end up with .1; the old value leaks in a bit

I've always wondered, if this were really true, why we don't see random errors cropping up constantly especially on heavily used portions of hard drives.

> 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

Is there a similiar random misalignment with the read head and, if so, why again do we not observe daily errors on heavily used portions of hard drives? If not then how does the read head compensate for the misalignment of the write head?

The questions are simple but the premise is sound. While I agree, in theory, with the technical papers that contend that this sort of data recovery can be done I don't see how, in practice, it can work for data recovery but not be a problem in everyday use. The magnetic field on the drive is what it is--it has no way of knowing if it is being read for recovery purposes or for standard reading.

Maybe there's a quantum mechanical "FBI/NSA/Investigator" bit which gets set at the beginning of the drive which instructs the rest of the magnetic fields to cooperate with investigative purposes in a recovery lab which is left unset inside of a standard computer. Personally I think that most of the technical papers discussing the theory behind such low level hard drive forensics rely on anecdotal empirical evidence from years past (mostly recovered from drives where people didn't bother to properly wipe the data at all--such as using quick formats) and add just enough extremely technical theory to make it sound plausible and keep the populance in starry-eyed awe (under the sway of FUD) of the near magical capabilities of the high priests in the Cathedral.