A Guide to Keeping Your Stories Safe - Part Deux
By Lucy Snyder

 

Last time, I told you all I'd dedicate this column to science. Perhaps I'd tell you about the 50 tiny monsters waiting to kill you at your neighborhood greasy spoon. Or maybe I'd show you some of the black, toothed beasties lurking at the bottom of the ocean.

I lied.

Because of my Day Job – and also because I ultimately felt my last column left some important bits out – I've still been thinking about the hazards writers face when it comes to using computers. So, all that gooey biological stuff will just have to wait until next time.

In my last column, I outlined the basic things you should do to keep your writing and other work safe when you go about your day-to-day business on your computer. But there comes a time when your computer hardware just gets too slow – or worse, it suffers some catastrophic hardware failure – and you need to replace it with a new machine. Maybe you give your old workhorse computer to your kids, or sell it on Ebay, or donate it to a charity. Maybe you dump that dead external hard drive in the trash. Either way, out of sight is out of mind, right?

Not so fast. Before you dispose of any device containing some form of static memory – be it an old computer, an external hard drive, a backup CD, a floppy disk, or a USB thumb drive – you need to make sure that you've destroyed any data you wouldn't want falling into the wrong hands.

So, before you dump an old drive or disk, take a look at what's on it. Old financial records? Your latest novel? Or, dear God, your first novel? And what about that, um, "special" video you shot when you and your honey went to Aruba? Yeah. If you don't want a stranger finding that stuff and passing it around to their friends, best to get rid of it.

The trouble is, simply deleting files doesn't really get rid of them electronically. And, unfortunately, simply reformatting your hard drive won't necessarily render old data inaccessible, either. True, after you've reformatted a hard drive, getting to the old data takes a bit of work, but a quick tour of random Web sites should be enough to show you that the world is full of People With Way Too Much Time on Their Hands.

And "dead" hard drives can be resurrected long enough to extract their data. For instance, techs at my Day Job have been able to pull an amazing amount of data off "dead" but spinnable hard drives with GetDataBack from Runtime Software (www.runtime.org) – these were from drives that Windows initially couldn't read at all. And you might have seen advertisements for expensive data recovery services – for $1000 or so they’ll retrieve crucial data from cooked drives. What these data recovery services sometimes do is open up the dead drive in a clean room, take out the drive platter and install it in a new hard drive housing. Determined data thieves can manage the same thing.

So, if you have a "dead" hard drive, or a floppy, Zip disk, CD, etc. that you plan to just chuck in the trash, your best course of action is to mechanically destroy the device first. If it's a drive, smash the sucker with a sledgehammer. Alternately, drilling a couple of holes straight through the drive works, too (but don't try this if you don't have the proper drill or safety gear). If it's a CD or DVD, find a CD shredder, or break it up with a hammer. I've been able to recover data from CDs that were broken cleanly in half, and I've seen other techs recover data from floppies that have been folded in half. So, chop 'em up. I don't recommend incineration because the plastics and metals used in the devices can give off poisonous smoke and leave behind toxic ash.

If you're passing your drive or storage medium on to somebody else, you'll need to make sure that your personal data has been securely erased. A single reformatting pass is far better than nothing, and if you are in a hurry, a single-pass reformat that zeroes out your data is even better. But for a secure reformat, you'll want to go with a 7-pass reformat that writes data over your disk 7 times; this of course may take quite a while. For the best security, you'll want to go with a 35-pass reformat, which can take many, many hours to complete depending on the speed of your processor and the size of your drive. The 35-pass method is used by institutions that handle large quantities of sensitive financial and identity data. If you've been keeping your tax records on your computer and you're about to sell it on Ebay, I'd certainly go with a 7-pass reformat.

People who are using Macs with OS 10.4 (or later) installed – or who have access to 10.4 installer DVDs – will find this process to be a breeze, since secure erasure methods are built into the Disk Utility. The MacOS Disk Utility can format or reformat UNIX, Macintosh, and Windows operating systems, so if you have a friend with a modern Mac and a firewire or USB external drive, you might ask to borrow their Mac for a little while. The Mac Disk Utility also lets you securely erase free disk space in instances where you want to pass along a used Zip disk, external hard drive, etc. with audio or video files intact but everything else inaccessible. It's also handy when you've prepped an old computer for someone else with a fresh copy of the operating system and select programs, only to remember that, oops, you forgot to do a secure reformat before you spent 3 hours on reinstallations.

Windows and Linux users who don't want to deal with a Mac have other programs they can use for secure data erasure. One piece of free software that many techs prefer is Darik's Boot and Nuke ("DBAN"), which can be downloaded at http://dban.sourceforge.net/. It will work on fairly old hardware, and the only desktop operating systems it doesn't support are Amiga and MacOS.

Last but not least, exercise caution when you're passing along disks or devices that use flash storage like SD cards or memory sticks. Flash memory doesn't work like hard drive memory; it can be written to a byte at a time, but if it's erased, a whole "block" of data must be erased, and flash memory can only be written to and erased a certain number of times before the memory starts to fail (most modern flash products are guaranteed to last through 1 million read-write cycles). So, to improve the life of the devices, when you "erase" a file on a flash drive, the operating system has probably left the data mostly sitting there intact. You'll have to reformat and zero out the flash device to have any level of data security.

As a consequence, cell phones and PDAs have given up an embarrassing amount of past users' personal data. So, if you keep your life on your Nokia, Palm, or BlackBerry, make sure you've followed the manufacturer's instructions for zeroing out your flash data before you pass your old phone or PDA along to somebody else.

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Lucy A. Snyder studied to become a biologist, trained to become a journalist, and now provides tech support for a very large university. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of print and electronic publications, including Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Guardian Angels, Villains Victorious, and Masques V.

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