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!

[gEvil (beta)]

Nonsense! I once turned a 5400RPM drive into a 7200RPM drive merely by giving it a good squirt of WD-40. I swear!

Re:nonsense!

[zhouray]

Damn! Now I think of Steve Ballmer every time I see the word "squirt". =(

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Tranny Ballmer is not more attractive than regular Ballmer.

Re:nonsense!

[thepotoo]

Ladies and gentlemen, we present to you this season's lame Slashdot joke! (Don't worry if you find it funny. It'll lose its charm in about ten or twenty repetitions.)

A guy with a sig like yours has no right to talk ;)

Re:

[Jesus_666]

A guy with a sig like yours has no right to talk ;)

You see, I'm an expert.

Write-only disk drive?

[wsanders]

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!"

Re:

[BrynM]

I have a physical version of this somewhere, but it was easy enough to google a PDF. I give you Write Only Memory [vmi.edu] (WOM). It's a joke so old, it has a Wikipedia page [wikipedia.org].

Back in the days of ST506...

[CustomDesigned]

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.

Privacy aspect

[tomalpha]

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.

Re:

[steveo777]

Very good call. Anybody know of any usefull tools to completely wipe the contents of a drive?

Re:Privacy aspect

[LordSnooty]

Yeah - a chainsaw, a garbage compacter and a wood chipper. And a rocket to launch the fragments into space.

Re:

[ultranova]

Yeah - a chainsaw, a garbage compacter and a wood chipper. And a rocket to launch the fragments into space.

There's always the chance that someone might glue the fragments back together. Melt the darn thing, I say. If you don't have actual smelting utilities, I'd imagine that an arc welder would work fine too, if applied to the whole surface area of each plate. Or just coat it the plates with magnesium and set them ablaze.

Re:Privacy aspect

[eam]

http://www.semshred.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php /id/680/tp/VE1HUj0xLHRpZD02NzIs [semshred.com]

Re:Privacy aspect

[networkBoy]

When a drive is to be re-used within the company I work for we do a "secure erase" using a utility IT has blessed. If a drive is to leave the company it is wiped with the assistance of a 1/4" drill bit through the platters in at least three places.

A hard drive is cheap. Company data (or potentially incriminating data for those of us at home) is not.
-nB

Re:

[eggstasy]

Sorry, that just means you eliminated the data on those three specific places. The rest of the platters can still be read, and whole files retrieved. The way data densities are today, even if you shatter a disk into a thousand pieces, a single, 1/1,000th piece of a 300 GB hard drive is still 300 MB... and breaking shit does not demagnetize it.

Re:

[networkBoy]

It's all about being harder to use the data.
By the time someone has read and re-constituted the data from a drive that damaged the data is likely already public, out of rev, or obsolete.

It's not like they don't wipe the drive first, it's just that they take the added step of mechanically destroying the drive. It's then off to the recyclers where (I believe) it is, in fact, smelted.
-nB

Re:

[Apocalypse111]

It's all about being harder to use the data.
Absolutly correct. Even without demagnetizing the disk, if you smash it into a zillion pieces then anyone who wants to read from it will be stuck using an electron microscope to read the polarities off the platter fragments - not a fast or inexpensive process.

The best "oh, shit!" solution for immediate, total data destruction is still thermite IMHO. Not only physically destroys the drive, but the heat demagnetizes it as well. Behond that, a couple shotgun

Re:Privacy aspect

[Mister Whirly]

With very, very long drill bits.

Re:Privacy aspect

[ultranova]

How do they do the drilling on the drives of laptops that get stolen?

They don't. Instead they just use Sony's batteries. Takes care of both data and thief in one blow.

Re:

[Sangui5]

If the drive still works, Eraser (http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/) is a great choice. Wipe one file or every block device on the machine. Nothing will be able to get it back after a Gutmann wipe.

If the drive doesn't work, disassemble the drive, remove the magnets (to play with later), and apply a combination of sandpaper and a hammer to the platters. Yeah, magnetic force microscopy might still get it back, but who'd pay that much for your mostly worthless data anyway?

Re:

[ehrichweiss]

I've heard that the 3-letter government agencies could retrieve data even if the drive were wiped 80 times BUT I also know from friends who are former hackers turned LEO that they actually don't have to look beyond someone doing a simple format most of the time since people are typically stupid in that regard.

Re:

[badfish99]

The "overwrite eighty times" stuff comes from some studies done in the days of 1GB drives. Basically, consumer-grade hardware in those days was not making full use of the storage capacity of the disks, and more sophisticated equipment could read information from between the tracks where the data was supposed to be stored.

Drive technology has evolved, and now your disk can store 80 times as much data as in those days, or even more, and there is no longer any wasted space. So the advice about wiping is rea

DoD spec.? Seven times... stop repeating the myth!

[Ayanami Rei]

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.

Re:DoD spec.? Seven times... stop repeating the my

[dbIII]

But disks can never go lower. Than can only be destroyed by melting or shredding

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 do

Re:

[Sangui5]

Well, that you can recover data doesn't mean you can reliably recover it, or do it fast. Hence no 40TB drives.

As for how, the short version is that if you write a one and then a zero, you end up with .1; the old value leaks in a bit. When combined with the error correction codes built in to the drive, you stand a decent chance of recovering the overwritten data (slowly, with special read heads/drive electronics, and somewhat error prone). If you overwrite with the same fixed pattern repeatedly, you really

Re:

[HomelessInLaJolla]

> As for how, the short version is that if you write a one and then a zero, you end up with .1; the old value leaks in a bit

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

Re:

[ajs318]

Changing from FAT16 to FAT32 doesn't overwrite most of the disk. FAT16 and FAT32 are very similar internally, so a drive already formatted as FAT16 just needs to have a FAT32 FAT written to it to make it FAT32.

Windows also has different FAT entries for "freshly formatted" and "deleted files", preferring not to overwrite a deleted file if it can avoid it. When you convert a disk from FAT16 to FAT32, the reformatter actually respects previously deleted files. If there was enough room on the drive to fit

Re:

[jimstapleton]

replace "x" with your hard drive's device

I like to run this (10 times) for a quite secure erase:

cat /dev/zero > /dev/x
cat /dev/random > /dev/x

I'd put it in 10 times, but, slashdot complains

Re:

[OmnipotentEntity]

Problem is, if the drive has any bad sectors, that fails and leaves the rest of the drive unerased.

I use badblocks read-write test. It's designed to do stuff like that.

Re:

[_anomaly_]

C:\>cat /dev/zero > /dev/C:
The system cannot find the path specified.

*sigh*

Re:Privacy aspect

[drinkypoo]

Anybody know of any usefull tools to completely wipe the contents of a drive?

Yes. I call it "thermite".

Re:

[db32]

We frequently use a heavy duty degausser for real wiping, but it also destroys the drive. But sometimes we get creative.

We had 40 gateways that just as the warranty expired started failing like clockwork. 6 out of 40 in the first month or two after it expired so we fought with them and got a free warranty extension on them. One of the hard drives that failed on us had to be sent back for replacement...so our boss told us to make sure that the data was gone and do it "however you want". So after runnin

Re:

[steveo777]

Right, well, I've got a laptop drive that's starting to make noise. It's under warentee, but I'd rather when I send it back that the info is completely missing. Nothing important, but I don't like the idea of the vendor knowing what my finances and the like are.

Re:

[tdemark]

I don't think it's the company you have to worry about. It's the person they send your drive to after they refurbish it you should be concerned about.

Re:Privacy aspect

[Mawbid]

Heh, yeah. I remember when my company bought a hard drive (sold as new, not refurbished) with an ntfs partition on it and a whole lot of personal data. There were pictures of a father and his baby taking a bath. Awww, isn't that sweet?.

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:

[archen]

dban should be find then. If time is a constraint then you just need 4 random passes over the drive. Personally I like the Gutman wipe with the 27 voodoo passes. Of course it doesn't work on any spare sectors, but assuming there isn't anything that fits on a sector that is critical that should be fine.

No. DoD grade is not 7 overwrites.

[Ayanami Rei]

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 fo

Re:No. DoD grade is not 7 overwrites.

[LurkerXXX]

DoD grade is complete destruction by an NSA-approved procedure. They remove and shred the platters.

Please don't perpetuate that myth.

Actually there are several different levels of DOD grade in handling of hard drives depending on the grade of the information on them (unclassified, secret, top secret, etc).

I refer you to the Clearing and Sanitization Matrix [dss.mil].

Approved ways to 'Sanatize' (as opposed to 'Clear') hard drives include:

"d. Overwrite all addressable locations with a character, its complement, then a random character and verify. THIS METHOD IS NOT APPROVED FOR SANITIZING MEDIA THAT CONTAINS TOP SECRET INFORMATION."

So overwriting is indeed DOD approved, just not for "top Secret" information.

Top Secret data may be 'Sanatized' by:

"a. Degauss with a Type I degausser"
"b. Degauss with a Type II degausser."

As well as

"m. Destroy - Disintegrate, incinerate, pulverize, shred, or melt."

-- which seems to be the only one you are familiar with.

Please do your research before accusing someone of perpetuating myths.

Re:

[PRC Banker]

I don't know how effective this is, but it's how I discard an old HDD, and it's fun! 1. Dismantle (sometimes hard to do) 2. Scrape platters with wire-gauze 3. Put drive plates in a fire for a few minutes, enough to warp a little 4. Randomly punish - skate on concrete, etc 5. Place in water, for a few months (toilet tank) 6. Discard

Re:Privacy aspect

[antifoidulus]

You put your hd in the toilet? Are you hoping to make next years list?

Re:

[drinkypoo]

The fire is probably all you actually need to do. Bonus points for heating it to the curie point, which should randomize the magnetic domains. Curie point is different for different materials... But of course, once all the coating is gone, what's left these days is usually Al or glass, and neither one has magnetic domains.

Re:

[Xugumad]

What do you call easy? You're probably looking at a few thousand dollars to retrieve the data on a drive, if you have to have it done professionally (in a sending it to the lab sense), assuming the owner has at least done a decent job of blanking it (zeroing all the bits or similar). Sure, it's feasible, but it's generally much easier to buy random drives on eBay, as you're almost guaranteed one that someone forgot to wipe before selling...

Re:

[atta1]

No, it doesn't. All a full format does is relabel all the sectors and erase the FAT or MFT.

Unbelievable but True Tales of Data Disaster...

[vivekg]

Original ontrack article - Top 10 List of Data Loss Disasters of 2006 [ontrack.com]

advert alert

[Anonymous Coward]

waste of time

The real list

[Anonymous Coward]

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 [ontrack.co.uk]

favorite data loss tale

[krell]

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.

The perfect secret weapon!

[Bananatree3]

One customer left a banana on top of his hard drive, which then rotted and seeped through into the device. The circuits were ruined and the drive failed to work.

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......

Re:

[OakDragon]

In a another, similar article, I read of people noticing a mysterious foul odor that seemed to be coming from one of the office computers. A tech investigated, and found that one of the plastic panels for an (empty) drive bay was a little loose. He opened it and found what looked to be a month-old taco. Seems somebody confused the computer for a fridge.

Re:The perfect secret weapon!

[LunaticTippy]

Oh sure, like none of us has ever used a computer to heat up some lunch.

Re:The perfect secret weapon!

[GammaKitsune]

Is that a banana in your server or are you just happy to see me?

Re:The perfect secret weapon!

[pilgrim23]

It is known that any given drive will max out on data in time. It would be good to...pear it down...
Thus the users could enjoy the fruits of their labor... I'll stop now...

Re:

[SpiritusGladius1517]

What if they have a pointed stick?

Re:

[Brickwall]

Shaddup!

Great Advertising for OnTrack

[waif69]

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.

Re:

[King_TJ]

Yeah... OnTrack has been around for *years*, doing data-recovery. I believe "DriveSavers" is another worthy competitor offering the same services.

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

Re:

[Himring]

And then, this other time, there was this other computer, and, like, something really bad had happened to it, and, like, they said they retrieved that data too ... it was awesome....

Ok...

[aliendisaster]

according to a data recovery company that has released a list of the most remarkable cases of data loss witnessed this year.

British comedian Dom Joly, presenter of Trigger Happy TV, thought the joke was on him when he dropped his laptop, damaging a hard drive containing 5,000 photos, 6,000 songs, a book he was writing and all of his newspaper columns.

Is dropping a laptop really that remarkable? I think they are just trying to name drop on this part.

Re:

[iainl]

No, it's just that they're trumpeting how wonderful dropping a laptop could be toward saving us from being submitted to any more of Joly's dire attempts at humour ever, ever again.

Re:

[thebdj]

Depending on the drop, yes it is. The physical parts of a hard drive do not like being banged around and with all the parts of the laptop being so tightly packed, it doesn't take a lot to give a drive a lot of shock, especially if it is spinning. It was because of this that companies (I think IBM [ibm.com], now Lenovo, Thinkpads were among the first) to provide systems to protect drives by attempting to detect the impending fall and stopping the drive the drive from spinning.

Re:

[ZaMoose]

Depends. Did you drop them on two elderly women in an attempt to take vengeance upon paparazzi [cnn.com]? No? Then it's probably not all that remarkable.

Less actionable, too.

TDWTF has some good stories.

[The MAZZTer]

Here's a good hard drive one. [nyud.net]

keyboard

[joerdie]

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.

Re:

[gt_mattex]

I had something similar to this. I was doing computer repair some years ago when a customer walked in claiming his new scanner would not work. I looked it over and tested it. It seemed to work fine.

I called the guy back over and asked him to replicate the error for me. He then proceeded to activate the scanner by placing his document up to the monitor and pressing the power button on the scanner.

I laughed so hard I almost passed out.

Re:

[multipartmixed]

> If you really never want to see your data again, just record it on a DVD-minus-R.

Scene at the Zeller's department store near my house:

Noob: What the difference between a DVD plus R and a DVD minus R?
Droid: The plus R, you can read to it and write to it. The minus R, you can burn but you can't read from it.
Me: So, what's the point of writing to a DVD if you can't read the data back?
Droid: *drool*
Noob: So what should I buy?
Me: How old is your computer?
Noob: Six months
Me: Anything'll do. But shop at a com

Interns

[Savage-Rabbit]

My favorite is still the intern who accidentally typed 'rm -rf / home/user' as root. The machine wasn't very important and the data was restorable from tape but it was still pretty funny to see the look on his face when he realized what he had done.

Re:

[Robmonster]

I used to love typing that into a workstation, but not pressing enter.

One user had the habit of clearing the screensaver by hitting Enter over and over...

Re:

[Johnny5000]

My favorite is still the intern who accidentally typed 'rm -rf / home/user' as root. The machine wasn't very important and the data was restorable from tape but it was still pretty funny to see the look on his face when he realized what he had done.

Similar story- once I was looking for a file so I tried to type "dir *.txt /s" or something similar from a DOS prompt, but my fingers typed "del *.txt /s" instead. Luckily I was able to stop it before it went through all of my directories, and undelete most of th

Re:

[Dr. Zowie]

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.

slashvertisement?

[minus_273]

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?

....and the problem is?

[krell]

The story summary said at the outset that it is the experiences of a data recovery company regarding data problems on damaged hardware. So what's the problem? It's not like that such a company is not a great source if you are looking to find out actual data loss/recovery anecdotes. Perhaps if you don't like such information, you should configure slashdot so you don't see "hardware" stories.

Re:

[krell]

I actually did not care so much about the quality of the article. It's been worth it for the even better stories posted as replies. Like the one about the dead rat PC.

Just an advertisment

[z_gringo]

That "article" is nothing more than a commercial for using their data recovery service.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

And what's worse, it's not even funny!

STOP POSTING ADS

[rbanzai]

"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.

Re:

[MECC]

I have to wonder - did /. get paid for this ad?

Re:

[oliderid]

By the way how do they recover the hard disk's data?

  For example I've heard a story a hard disk fallen into the sea and they managed to recover some data. How do they do?

My Confession

[gmajor]

I have a confession to make. I lost my data due to my sheer incompetence.

One late night, I surfed browsed through my government's website to look for some very important information. After about an hour of searching, I finally found a link to the document I needed. I had 5 other browser windows open, pointing to pages I needed. I thought the link would lead to an html page, but it was actually a pdf.

I merrily clicked on the link. Adobe Acrobat opened up inside the web browser. And to my horror, but not to m

Adobe Acrobat does not play nice

[krell]

It always slows things down, and often has idiotic upgrade messages to wade through. Thankfully, Google often offers HTML translations of PDF files it links to. I only wish they offered this for ALL pdf files, instead of just some. PDF for web content is a nuisance to be bypassed.

Commonly

[Himring]

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....

Re:Commonly

[Lumpy]

I got a free laptop and a free $900.00 Universal MX-3000 remote that way. Both were damaged by smoke in a fire. they were being tossed at a clients home I snagged them and soaked both in distilled water for days, finally ended spraying down the boards, drying and then reassembling.

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.

Advert for a company NOT to go to..

[mdobossy]

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.

Re:

[Poltron Inconnu]

I'd highly suspect that they got permission to do so in all cases. The named individual probably even got the service in exchange for the publicity as it mentions they contacted him after reading about his problem in the paper. If there was not a prior agreement then I'm sure there will soon be an article on Slashdot about the lawsuit. Your comment isn't insightful, it's silly. Many companies give away their services or products in exchange for the right to publicize. And considering that your average Joe o

Re:

[stereoroid]

If you're talking about Dom Joly, did you even read TFA? He wrote about his mishap in a column in a UK national newspaper (The Independent on Sunday), after which OnTrack contacted him. So, what are you referring to?

Re:

[The Cisco Kid]

With the exception of the one guy's whose name they specifically mentioned, (and I consider it likely tht they did get his permission), no other clients were identified. They did give details of the mishaps, but you dont know *who* had these mishaps. Heck, they could have made them up. The point is that they give examples of just how badly you can fuck up a drive, and they are still able to recover the info from it. As long as they arent identifying the clients, or revealing the data the recovered, I think

N00bkes

[SuperStretchy]

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.

Re:

[binner1]

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 surprise

Nothing but a press release. Move along.

[amper]

Can we at least *try* to avoid posting false news items that are really nothing more than thinly-disguised press releases?

What is "False" about it?

[krell]

"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?

Re:

[idontgno]

I think the fundamentally false premise is that this story is actually news.

However, at least it's interesting. Everyone loves someone else's disaster story.

Backup?

[PhoenixK7]

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 :-)

Freeze your bad hard drives

[jgercken]

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.

Photography losses

[khendron]

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.

Unix Horror Stories

[Megane]

This was linked into the most recent thread at thedailywtf, and having just now finished reading it, it obviously deserves to be linked here as well to increase your own morning "gotta read this" time: unix horror stories [cam.ac.uk]

And never forget to mount your scratch monkey...

"priceless" data until they hear what the price is

[dmccarty]

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.

Fixing "Dead" HDs

[G4from128k]

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.

Re:

[krell]

"We also had a person bring in a PC that wouldn't work. The technician opened the case, and there was a big dead rat in the case. Not a mouse, a rat, nest and all."

I wonder if it was some prank further up the line. How many PCs have a rat-sized hole in them for this to happen? And what about the stench? Did someone have an "Oh, I thought Gateways were supposed to smell this way" excuse?

Re:

[Si]

How many PCs have a rat-sized hole in them for this to happen?

Probably smaller than you think [multnomah.or.us].

Re:

[ajs318]

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

Re:

[fuzz6y]

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.

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.

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