Ride the Lightning

NO BLINDFOLDS, NO CIGARETTES: CONDEMNED HARD DRIVES

September 6, 2007

Around here, we do a lot of hard drive wiping. Normally, we use utilities that do a single wipe, which is generally quite sufficient. We wipe the drives of our law firm and corporate clients and we wipe drives that have contained electronic evidence in court cases. Sometime, when folks are especially anxious, we wipe seven times, according to the Department of Defense specifications. More expensive, but we’ll do it if asked. In reality, we’ve never seen the restoration of data from a drive that’s been wiped once.

However, if you really, really, really want to be sure that data is gone, I recently read of a company that is providing that kind of insurance. A New Jersey company called Back Thru the Future Computer Recycling, Inc. (http://www.backthruthefuture.com)  is very serious about the total destruction of hard drives and any other digital media. Hard to believe, but they use an extraordinarily secure tracking system, armored trucks and armed, uniformed guards for transport. Once the condemned hard drives, etc. are received onsite, their tracking tags are photographed, they are inventoried and a secondary confirmation is obtained from the client that the media should be destroyed.

In a shower of sparks and hums, crackles and pops, the media is rendered into shreds by a machine that looks much like an industrial air conditioner. It is then photographed once more in its altered state and an Affidavit of Destruction is issued to the client. Overkill? Perhaps, but data destruction is reputedly a more than $2 billion per year business.

The company is laudably very "green" in its approach and recycles its waste. That Coke can you’re holding could well have originated from condemned law firm hard drives. Quite a thought.

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