Hard Drive Shredding is Not Enough

Hard drive shredding is not like paper shredding: cutting a drive into little pieces won’t get rid of the data. True data destruction eliminates the magnetic field on a magnetic hard drive. To destroy the magnetic field, you need a degausser. The degaussing process removes the magnetic fields which accomplish total data destruction. Don’t be caught hard drive shredding unless you have first degaussed the drive. Garner degaussers give you peace of mind that your magnetic media are totally erased. On a degaussed drive, the magnetic field that was the data simply does not exist.

[@michaelharstrick4417]

To clarify for the commenters below: a 2mm particle from a modern HDD has 600,000 pages of data on it, and yes you can read it with an MFM. A shredder that can even get a HDD to 2mm iis the size of a room and costs over 6 figures. An entry level 10,000 gauss degausser costs about $4k, and takes 7 seconds........................

[@christopherleubner6633]

A Cumberland B60 does the job rather well. They are a bit spendy but a surplus one in need of minor repair is 5 figures and the fixes are about a grand or two ime. New grandulators are very costly though 6 figures or 7 figures 🤔 😮

[@qazmatron]

You can shred first AND THEN degauss the pieces...

[@christopherleubner6633]

To completely destroy first shred several drives to 3mm particle size, then feed past an electromagnet that sorts out aluminum steel board and platter bits. The platter pieces then fall into a container of acid to remove the metal coating.

[@tylerdurden783]

This is nonsense. I will give you $1000 if you can recover the data from a properly shredded (to 2mm particles) hard drive XD

[@haxboi5492]

I will actually loan out a million if they succeed

[@Hiphopasaurus]

But the company that sells degaussers says that it's only safe if you use a degausser.

[@VampireConnoisseur]

I mean... theoretically the data is still there i guess?
But yeah shredding should be fine. It's not like we are being hunted by the government (FBI, CIA etc) with their high forensic skill or something. No regular person will be so obsessed with your data i think

[@AndriiTyshchenko]

@@VampireConnoisseur Not even CIA/FBI/etc is able to assemble a meaningful data sequence from the raw magnetic domains on shredded pieces. There are so many levels of abstraction and addressing between the magnetic domains seen with a microscope and the byte stream of top_secret_data.doc file, it is just impossible as of now and in many years to come.

[@christopherleubner6633]

You could literally recover the data, but usable information... good luck with that 😂