On Fri, 21 Jan 2005 01:47, Anthony Atkielski wrote: > Matthew Seaman writes: > > MS> If your drive contains or once contained military secrets, then in the > MS> USA and probably anywhere in the West, standard disposal procedure is > MS> that the drive be completely overwritten with specific patterns of > MS> random data several times, and then taken to a secure facility where > MS> the whole thing is literally stamped flat and chewed into small lumps > MS> of scrap. > > Assuming one doesn't have the resources to do this, what might one do to > secure disk drives before disposal. I've thought of opening them up and > scratching the platters or chopping them into pieces (not sure how hard > this might be to do), or something. Home incineration isn't very > practical, nor are machines that can chop metallic platters into > confetti. > > Also, is there anything like a bulk degausser for disk platters (after > removal from the drives)? Come to think of it, I can't remember the > last time I saw a tape degausser, and I still am not quite sure what to > do with old backup tapes that are unreadable but still filled with > backup data.
I open up my old backup tapes & use a cutting blade to cut through the tape spool in a couple of places, to you end up with hundreds of pieces of tape, no more than a couple of centimetres long. Then I generally throw them in a couple of different bins. Tape de-gaussers usually aren't much good - they were mostly made for erasing open reel tape that used ferric oxide particles. Backup tapes normally use metal particle tapes that need a much stronger magnetic field to effectively erase them. Cheers, -- Ian GPG Key: http://homepages.picknowl.com.au/imoore/imoore.asc
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