Seems like a fun idea to entertain, but they change all of the passwords when they retire either an employee or a machine
I'll either smash with a hammer or use a series or drill holes through a drive before I dispose of them even if they go bad. Better safe than sorry, right?
Those institutions should know better, tbh. I don't care about family pictures and tax returns being restored/recovered, but those documents? At least their IT departments should be punished somehow. Idiots.
how easy is it to restore one? I have an old drive that my dad said format this for me, now hes like umm can you get this file off it? I was like ummm i dont think so... but ill try and find out.
For you and me? Fairly easy, even after multiple formats - or even after 'Darik's Boot And Nuke" LiveCD (http://www.dban.org/). Depending on how important that data is to you or your father, physically destroying the HDD is almost the only way you can be certain that it can't be recovered. There are other ways to make sure that the previous information is 99.9% un-recoverable, but I'm too tired to look that up right now. Of course, in most cases it's not really necessary, but you never know who might get his/her hands on the HDD...
This is exactly why I zero out all hard drives when I decommission them from my system before I pop it into another machine. Even when my old white Macbook had to be sent back as Apple agreed to give me a new aluminium Macbook in the exchange, I did a 2 pass zero out (MacOS X's disk utility comes with the option to zero out the drives). deltatux
If the information is that sensitive, why aren't they destroyed, no department of defense wiping them with zeros 7 times, simply destroyed...incinerated..somethin
Even that is recoverable, believe it or not. Just depends on how much time, effort and money you are willing to spend. :nerd:
^^ hey plz can u lemme knw if u find something useful , i ve been trying to find how to recover files but couldnt find nything useful rather then some lame soft. which say they recover files but in actual they dont
I believe you but it still sounds a bit far-fetched. There is software which will overwrite data with random streams of 1s and 0s several times. It is kinda hard to believe that anything useful can be recovered from that.
Post solely dedicated to Cybermancer; First off you cannot blame IT department for security breaches, it is the task of the IT team to implement security feature and best practices to their end users. But it is then the job of the AUDITING department to make sure no FLAWs are in the security procedure and most of the time the auditing FAILS by a very large margin. It is then that the firm/company SUES the auditing third party for failing at what they were hired for. Either ways people are lazy and probably some individual is to blame not a group or department And yes I agree that burning an HD is the best way to make the data unrecoverable
Well, in my post I was referring to institutions like the hospitals, mentioned in the quote, in the first post. Those do usually have an IT department whose responsibility it is to implement computer maintenance and other procedures. Among those should be guidelines regarding what happens with old computers and the hardware. It is their responsibility to make sure that the HDDs are properly formatted or the data destroyed at a reasonable level - especially if it is personal patient/client data. At least that's basically how it works in the hospital my wife works in... I wish, I could give you a better answer than this, but the last book I read a few weeks ago, "The Hacker Crackdown", written by Bruce Sterling, a non-fictional book about the events when America's telephone system crashed in the early 90ies and its implications from the point of view of different groups (hackers, phreaks, law enforcement, businesses), mentions exactly this scenario about formatting HDDs and the recovery of the contents from them. I know, it's kind of an old book (revised in 1994, iirc), but HDD technology didn't change that much since then. Well, it got perpendicular, faster and cheaper, but it's more or less the same principle. In general, you are right of course, vidra, but afaik it is - again: if you are willing to spend enough time, money and effort - possible to recover data from formatted HDDs. So, practically it is very unlikely that it will be recovered, but theoretically it could be (afaik). Who really knows how much secret services are spending on stuff like that? p.s.: Something I also seem to remember from that book was an off-track format that would make recovery next to impossible, though.
decade's ago when all suff was on paper only, a company that was specialized in archive destroying came with a big truck, loaded the paper and they burned it or something. Sinds a HD is a long lasting piece of hardware maybe the best thing is to build in a self destoying function ( this hard drive will be destroyed in 3, 2, 1 click)
