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: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.