What Not To Do With Your Data 319
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."
Great Advertising for OnTrack (Score:2, Interesting)
Commonly (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
A hard drive is cheap. Company data (or potentially incriminating data for those of us at home) is not.
-nB
Re:Commonly (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Great Advertising for OnTrack (Score:3, Interesting)
I used to work for a small business that partnered up with them to get a discount on drive recovery work we sent in to them (and then we'd get to keep the difference as a commission).
The problem with these places is that the cost of recovering data is so high, it's unfathomable for most home or small business customers. For example, one of my previous customers had their home office PC's drive fail after it was only a year old or so. They had all of their tax records stored on it, and shortly after it crashed, they discovered they were being audited by the IRS! They wanted us to attempt to recover it, but the drive refused to even spin up - so there was nothing else I was able to do. The quotes I received for recovery started at the $3000 range and up. (They go by the size of the hard drive, primarily.) When I told them the estimated cost, they cringed and saying "That's 3 times what the whole computer cost us new, last year!", decided to manually reassemble all their tax records, rather than retrieve the data from the drive.
Re:The freezer method? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:DoD spec.? Seven times... stop repeating the my (Score:3, Interesting)
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.