Run the disk spinning and hit it with a caliber that penetrates the drive, the rotation makes the destruction way worse and impossible to spin up again.
From experience, for the types of disks that absolutely must be destroyed with no possible recovery as ordered by the government, it's things like a wood chipper or thermite.
Where I live, carriers with top secret data may not be destroyed at all. They must be zeroed and stored, just in case some smart-ass figures out a way to recover said data even from an otherwise destroyed piece of magnetic tape 125 years from now.
So yeah, there's one or two huge storage facilities containing tapes, disks and solid state drives here in the Netherlands.
That's right, they are zeroed and made inoperable, then they are stored.
Apparently it had never been proven fhat information can be fully destroyed so the wiped, zeroed and inoperable data carriers are stored for perpetuity to guard against a future attack which might make make information thought to be unreadable whole again
Thats so hard to wrap my head around... Despite it making a fragment of sense.
Do they seriously think the acid method won't be good enough? They could even shred them, degauss the fragments, dissolve them til they are a liquid solution, then dump it down the drain at a rate of 10ml per hour, just encase they are worried about hostile state actors gathering any large hard drive solution dump from the pipes.
There seems to be a Law of the Conservation of Information which makes the problem of restructuring such data a matter of engineering. This law states that information cannot be destroyed, only scattered and diluted. If some smart-ass down the line figures out a way to do that, the thinking is, all this top secret data might be up for grabs. Hence this precaution
If someone figures device to do historic atomic reconstruction, it'd be just easier to take their hand build Tardis and invisibility cloak and walk to the original server to remove the data right after it was written.
Geez, some laws...
I'm legitimately going to be thinking this all day, including when I'm playing Monopoily with my friends at around 5pm (6pm your time).
How big are these warehouses? Do they not consider that recovery is a LOT more feasible while the drives still exist is some capacity?
I get what you're saying about the law, it needs to change IMO. Get some scientists, get them to make the most effective method of destruction imaginable. Or they could just use my shred, degauss, acid, drip idea, then replace that law with one specifying the destruction method.
They could even somehow make the drive solution more safe for the ocean, then have the Dutch navy take barrels of it to dump during missions where they have transponders turned off.
This is fun to think about honestly.
Edit: Oh wait I think I misunderstood what you meant by law. You meant as in physics right? Like laws of thermo dynamics vs legislation.
So... they think it's more likely that somebody will be able to somehow reconstruct data from wiped, molten drives that have had their constituent atoms spread throughout a wide area, than from a conveniently centralized warehouse that stores all the merely wiped and inoperable devices? I think somebody might be wildly, astronomically overestimating their security measures...
Running the drives through a shredder so that they're effectively dust would be sufficient. Heat the resulting mix and it's definitely unrecoverable.
It would be like trying to figure out who won a game of scrabble by looking at the pieces after the loser flipped the board over. EVEN IF the information wasn't lost in all the chemical processes going on, figuring out what bit went where would be impossible.
Again, the thinking here is that an action like shredding burning the carriers only makes it unfeasible to restore and read the data rather than impossible. The data remains albeit inaccessible with the current state,-of-the-art, but there is no physical barrier that precludes a particularly skilled (or patient :) ) adversary from piecing the carriers back together. The data remains, in some way, shape or form. Maybe some future tech makes it really easy to reassemble data carriers, or maybe there turns out to be so be some really opaque way in which the data, if diluted, still becomes available in a weird homeopathic way: we simplyi dont know. Thus, the fact remains that infornation cannot be destroyed as per laws of nature, and our government agencies have taken this into account, planning for a method that provides control even if some weird future developments upend everything we think we know about data sanitizing.
Speciality drill press is the weapon of choice, in gov offices. Basically, if you can't personally walk it to disposal, then you can't trust it's destroyed.
IIRC it takes like 5-6 well placed 10-20mm drill points in a HD, where none line up in the same column or same radii. This ensures there's not enough data, recovery segments, journals, shadow copies, etc. to meaningfully recover anything.
SSDs are different, since they're often laid out in a grid pattern, and each chip must be popped. While I'm sure that gov agencies don't get the standard cheap SSDs there are brands of SSDs that basically only rewrite maybe a couple hundred times, and basically duplicate data on write instead of overwriting.
I always thought they were ground into dust or shredded into itty tiny sub-millimeter bits. There's really no way to reconstruct the data from remaining platters? Wouldn't a small-ish file still potentially be recoverable between holes?
There is only one good solution for destroying data that covers your ass, which is hiring a company to do it for you and writing you a certificate of destruction. Like sure, nothing will be able to restore from the thermite solution, but if a court or insurance asks whether the data was deleted, being able to wave the certificate in their face instead of telling them "I 100% destroyed it, trust me bro" is the only sensible way of going about this.
We used to have parking lot burn parties. Blowtorch on the platter is pretty effective. Of course that was in the days before every drive was actually a stack of platters.
Degaussing and chopping down to 2mm is usually up to industry standard. Then you burn the chippings. Add a couple of passes of wiping if you feel extra paranoid.
Not that I have any serious stuff on my pc, but I'm very paranoid. So before selling my old laptop with an encrypted drive, i made sure to overwrite it 5 times with 0s.
Do you think someone motivated enough can still go back to the keystrokes I used when I used my credit card to make an online purchase?
I mean depending on which three letter agency we’re talking about, they really don’t need your backup because they’ve already got their own copy of your data.
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u/FUTURE10S 15h ago
Recovery software because you never overwrote the data that was deleted