Ask Slashdot: Datacenter HDD Wipe Policy?

Posted by timothy on Wednesday August 6, 2014 @09:23AM from the oh-just-a-bunch-of-16-digit-numbers-and-names dept.

New submitter socheres (1771002) writes I keep a Slackware server hosted at various datacenters on leased hardware for personal / freelance business use. I have been doing this for the last 10 years and during this time I moved my stuff to several datacenters, some small and some big name companies. No matter the hosting company, since I choose to install my own OS and not take a pre-installed machine, I always got the hardware delivered with the previous guys' data stored on the hard drives. It was also the case with spare drives, which were not installed new if I did not ask specifically for new ones. Has this happened to you? How often?

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Physical destruction by BaronM · 2014-08-06 09:32 · Score: 2, Interesting

I've been in the IT infrastructure business for years, and have always relied on physical destruction (shredding) of hard drives when disposing of old systems.
I can see where that may not be cost effective with leased systems, but I would take your experience as a warning to clean up after yourself and secure-wipe hard drives when your lease is up and not count on the datacenter to do it for you.
IANAL, but I also wonder who owns the data on a leased hard drive when the lease is up? If you improve an apartment or build a building on leased land, those improvements typically become the property of the owner when the lease is up. I wonder if that has been addressed with data in the absence of relevant contractual language?