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Monday, May 12. 2008

A hard disk goes down in flames through the atmosphere and specialists were still able to recover 90 percent of the data: Data recovered from Seagate drive in Columbia shuttle disaster. At the end, data seems to be more resistant then most of us believe, when you put a vast amount of effort behind the recovery.

This leads me to annother thoughtgame: Let´s assume, you shredder a disk to pieces as tiny as 1 square millimeter. This would just look like dust to you. A modern harddisk stores 200 gigabit per square inch. One square inch are 645.16 square milimeters. Thus a harddisk would store 310 megabits on a square milimeter. Let´s assume 10 bits per byte (for error correction and similar things) and you have 31 megabytes worth of data on one of these pieces of dust.

It´s just a question of effort to recover the data, when you can yield 10 million euros out of the data (trade secrets, credit card data) it would give you a nice profit when you spend for example 9 million to recover the data. Yet another reason for cryptography everywhere or you may end up with degaussing, shreddering and remelt your old harddisks just to be safe.

Posted by Joerg Moellenkamp in English, Security at 09:57 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

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I wonder if this is really as spectacular as it appears at first sight and if there really was a vast amount of anything required. Ontrack have been recovering data from burned media for ages. As long as the platters weren't physically bent or cracked or something, this probably was standard procedure.

Also, though I really find it tempting myself, it would probably be wise to not confuse this with recovery of data from deliberately deleted media.

#1 martin (Homepage) on 2008-05-12 12:16 (Reply)

It´s not the effort of Ontrack thats spectacular, it´s the complete story: An harddisk without special protections goes down to earth in a breaking and burning spaceship and at the end it some specialists were capable to recover 90 percent of the data. From my point of view, this is really impressive. An albeit this may be a standard procedure for Ontrack, it´s still a challenge ... for every harddisk to recover again.

Data is more resilient as we think, that could leave one with the conclusion that we should put more effort into destroying data.

#1.1 Joerg+M. (Homepage) on 2008-05-12 13:12 (Reply)

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