On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 10:46 AM, David McSpadden <[email protected]> wrote: > ... personal info from police departments and what not’s because copiers have > hard drives in them and they retain everything that is copied to them over > time.
Some copier and printers do indeed have hard disks in them, not unlike the ones you find in a PC. Others have flash cards, or other kinds of non-volatile solid-state storage. They generally don't "retain everything" unless you deliberately configure them to do that. You might find "deleted" spool data on unallocated portions of the filesystem, though, just like you can with a PC disk. How realistic a possibility that is depends on the design of the machine. Some normally spool to volatile RAM and don't touch the hard disk except for "special" jobs; others spool everything to disk first. Some machines default to deliberately overwriting storage on delete in order to compensate for this; others can do so as an option. Some don't do it on delete, but can be told to do so on command (e.g., as part of decommissioning). How big a threat this is depends on the nature of your data. As a bank, you prolly have some just cause to be concerned, but I wouldn't panic about it. Contact your copier vendor(s). All the big copier companies should be able to provide information on data remanence. Most of them can also provide sanitization instructions. Unfortunately, for some machines, sanitization involves removing and physically destroying storage elements, but that's becoming less common as data remanence becomes a more mainstream concern. It is a good idea to consider non-volatile storage when getting rid of anything. Be glad you're not working on a DoD contract that requires you to physically destroy storage elements before release, no matter what the manufacturer says. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
