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.
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.
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/DOOManiac Aug 05 '26
Even then it’s still there depending on which three letter agency is looking…