Knowledge restoration specialist Safe Knowledge Restoration has shared the outcomes of a restoration undertaking that tried to learn the way many recordsdata might be recovered from numerous laborious drives (slightly than strong state drives or reminiscence playing cards) completely for TechRadar Professional.
The companyy bought 100 laborious drives at random and tried to get well knowledge utilizing affordable means; for this present train, it determined to not make investments assets into recovering knowledge from broken or encrypted safe drives, as many of those circumstances would have been salvageable.
Safe Knowledge Restoration recovered knowledge from 69 drives with 30 broken HDDs and just one encrypted drive. Not one of the drives have been hybrid ones (which mixes a little bit of strong state reminiscence and conventional spinning drives). Greater than 5.7 million recordsdata have been recovered though that quantity was skewed by a single laborious drive that contained greater than 3.1 million recordsdata. The oldest recovered drive was a 2.5-inch Western Digital mannequin from 2004; practically two thirds of the drives bought have been 3.5-inch fashions.
Completely pure?
The findings spotlight a widely known truth: most customers do not have thorough destruction or disposal plans after changing broken or out of date laborious drives (e.g. these counting on PATA or SCSI interfaces).
In different phrases, a worrying minority of customers will do away with laborious drives laden with recordsdata whereas some will undergo the method of really deleting them. Solely a tiny fraction (1% within the analysis) will go all the way in which and truly encrypt the host drive.
Seems that the years of eBay warning potential distributors of creating positive their laptops and storage units have been cleaned most likely fell on a ton of deaf ears.
A spokesperson for the corporate advised us {that a} laborious drive is outlined as sanitized if no knowledge was discovered, it was both fully wiped or crammed with a random sample (just like the Division of Protection’s three-pass technique). The spokesperson additionally confirmed what occurred to the info after restoration: “We followed our typical, strict data-handling practices, which include over 100 security controls. We never viewed the contents of any recovered file and securely purged the data after the exercise.”
Methods to get rid of a tough drive safely and securely
Jake Reznik, Laboratory Operations Supervisor at Safe Knowledge Restoration, is an skilled at recovering recordsdata. Here is his tackle how one can do away with your laborious drive (inner or exterior).
“Before sanitizing, back up important files to avoid data loss (ed: You can use a backup software or a service from our best cloud backup provider), then select the preferred destruction method based on your needs. Erasure software allows the hard drive to be reused but overwrites the original data with random patterns over multiple passes. Afterward, verify that the program properly wiped all data.
Other methods damage the hard drive beyond repair. Degaussing uses a powerful magnetic field to demagnetize the platters and scramble the existing data. Running a hard drive through a media shredder tears the device’s components into small metal pieces. Disintegrating is an enterprise option that reduces particle size to a fine residue. Using a drill to puncture the drive’s platters in several spots is a cost-effective method.
In general, methods that physically destroy the hard drive are more secure. Some parties even choose a combination of destruction methods to ensure the data is unrecoverable. For the best results, consult a professional service to ensure safe hard drive destruction and disposal.”
For additional studying, take a look at what is the distinction between knowledge restoration software program and knowledge restoration companies to search out out the perfect answer on your file restoration woes, perceive how knowledge restoration software program works and what to search for when selecting knowledge restoration companies