As part of our preparation to move into House244, we have been engaged in another round of evaluating the stuff we own and deciding how much more we can do without. On the discard pile were a couple of old computers, neither of which we have used for some time. One has been donated to a friend who is setting up an IT support business (contact EX1414 Computer Services for all your computing needs!). The other was even older and didn’t even boot up properly.

Most of it has been disposed of but I was left with the hard drives. All of them, as far as I could ascertain, were broken but that meant I couldn’t easily go in and erase the data on them. Potentially someone else could recover information from them. They wouldn’t find anything incriminating but there might be financial records from a few years ago or even a list of passwords I was using at the time (as I recall, I used to store those in a plain text file although I have long ago moved to powerful encryption). Therefore, I wanted to be sure the disks were beyond any potential use.

Earlier this week I waved them around near the powerful magnet at the back of one of my guitar amps. That should have further scrambled whatever data was on them. This morning, I took them outside with a five pound hammer and gave them a good pounding. The controllers and connectors are beyond repair and the internal platters are now deformed and scratched. Along with a bit of gravel and dirt inside each one to continue the abrasion they should be safely beyond recovery that would even begin to be economical!

Technorati Tags:

computers

data security