[wplug] degaussing tapes and hard drives

Patrick Wagstrom pwagstro at andrew.cmu.edu
Tue Feb 21 20:35:33 EST 2006


> Have you considered just overwriting them with many copies of the same
> irrelevant files?

You're missing a couple of points here.  First of all, overwriting with
data can help, but you'd need to do it A LOT -- over a long period of
time.  There are tools out there that do a pretty good job of reading
data that's been written over on disks -- OnTrack data recovery does a
lot of their business doing that.

Secondly, if there are a lot of tapes, it will take a very long time to
overwrite them all.  Remember, tape drives are kinda slow.  I know I
wouldn't want to sit around and wait for them to be overwritten, only to
do it again, and again, and again...for each tape.

Degaussing is probably the way to go here.  Fire, while fast, and cheap,
misses the fact that the tapes can't be destroyed only the data.  Your
solution while preserving the tapes, isn't all that cheap (time), and
isn't fast.  A degausser appears to be fast and preserves the tapes, but
isn't cheap.  When you factor in salary that you'd have to pay for
someone to dump the tapes, it's probably awash.  Yup, it looks like you
can only can pick two of three of fast, cheap, and correct.

--Patrick




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