Hi
And this is a problem if you rely on something you can not verify immediately. For example if I use a big hammer I immedialtey see the results. But a degaußed Disk does not looked destroyed - you can not verify it with your eyes.
You see the physical result but does that really reliably mean that the data is not recoverable? I’m just thinking of the work some germans are doing to reconstruct shreddered stasi files: they also seemed completely destroyed, at least enough that the stasi considered it enough, yet they are being reconstructed. I’d imagine that a hammer would not be enough to be _certain_ that reconstruction is _impossible_ (not just more or less convinced that no one will put in the effort to attempt it). Are you sure it is enough? When is it enough? I imagine bent platters are hard but not quite impossible to reconstruct and the effort required would probably not be worth the results in most cases. But that always depends on the significance of the data on the disks … I wouldn’t feel _certain_ with neither hammer nor degausser because I’m not a recovery expert. Melting the platters down with just heat or thermite or something would probably convince me. Shredding them to 1x1mm tiny pieces would leave me reasonably certain enough for most scenarios, as well.
Any data recovery experts on this list who can shed more light?
Thanks
Hendrik
On Wed, 7 Dec 2022 08:25:01 +0100 Klaus Darilion via swinog swinog@lists.swinog.ch wrote:
-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: Per Jessen via swinog swinog@lists.swinog.ch Gesendet: Dienstag, 6. Dezember 2022 22:40 An: swinog@lists.swinog.ch Betreff: [swinog] Re: How to destroy data effectively?
Martin Ebnoether via swinog wrote:
Hi all.
As some of you know, I work at a money laund... financial company. Some time ago, the question arose, how to effectively destroy data safely and securely in an easy way?
When I worked in money laun... finance myself, in the 1980s, we used _large_ electromagnets.
We used to use a "Degaußer" for hard disks. Recently, a colleague put the degaußed disk back into his PC and could read data without problems. So, either the Degaußer is broken or for whatever reasons it did not work. And this is a problem if you rely on something you can not verify immediately. For example if I use a big hammer I immedialtey see the results. But a degaußed Disk does not looked destroyed - you can not verify it with your eyes.
So, we do not rely on degaußing anymore without verifiying (reconnect and test). So we prefer the hammer or commercial services (which still can fail, but then you can sue someone)
regards Klaus _______________________________________________ swinog mailing list -- swinog@lists.swinog.ch To unsubscribe send an email to swinog-leave@lists.swinog.ch