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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?"
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?
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
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.
Ah, the old read mail, real fast routine. Love it...
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)
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
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.
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
Yes! As long as the drive's already been formatted once, all you need to do is write out an empty sector map (or FAT, or inode table, or whatever name your OS calls it) showing that every sector on the disk is "free space" and not part of a file. You don't need to change the data. The awkward bit is finding out which sector on the disk belongs to which file.
Data that has actually been overwritten, even just once, can never, no matter what anyone tells you, be recovered by any kind of analysis of the drive. But data isn't often overwritten. When you "delete" a file, it just gets marked as free space -- what's worse, it actually gets marked as "free space, after a fashion, but only use as a last resort" so as to give you a longer window of opportunity to recover it. New stuff will only get saved over the top of old stuff if there's really nowhere else to stick it. You can make sure data gets overwritten by first filling up the drive with junk files till there's no room to save anything else, then deleting the stuff you want rid of (which just marks it as free space), then creating more junk files -- knowing that the only place they can possibly be saved now, is over the top of the stuff you just deleted. Delete all the junk files and the drive is ready for re-use.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
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?"
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
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.
That's just not true. It certainly isn't going to be recoverable without taking the drive apart, but there's a reason FIPS standards require multiple overwrites with 1s, 0s, and random bit patterns.
There are filesystems that do this, but not FAT, or NTFS, or EXT2. A file may not get overwritten because it's not the right size (a deleted 1MB file won't make room for a 2MB new file, so the OS might choose a bigger free chunk to drop it in, rather than having to fragment it), but there's no preference given to "clean" bits.
Neither necessary nor sufficient. US Government offices use a secure deletion program like shred(1) (or rather, a variant that they've certified) for sensitive data, and a belt sander for top secret data.
If you're going to be elitist, it would help to be elite.
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.
No, the problem is the ".*" -- it matches "..", which is the containing directory, so it blows away every user's files just like "rm -r *" would in /usr/users.
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.