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Help Me Out with This

So I got a gig Thursday, the kind of gig that could lead to another cloud migration mission (the first one you helped me with went swimmingly by the way), but the first and presently the only item on the list is that they’ve got ten computers they want to throw out but before they do they want confidence that no one’s going to be stealing their data.

The woman asked me how long this would take, I spat out one or two hours.

Regarding her degree of paranoia, it’s a small real estate brokerage. These people are extremely territorial over their contacts and leads. So just formatting the hard drives, though it’s probably enough, isn’t quite enough for a first impression as I want to get my foot in the door here and earn their trust. I can’t just format or repartition the drives.

So I’m thinking A) pop them all open, open up each individual hard drive, stab and scratch and mangle the platters with a solid screw driver, B) a variation of that involving a large blunt (or sharp) tool that security won’t freak when I bring it in or somewhere in between by just hammering in screwed through all of them.

Or I could take some software approach, erasing, stuffing the drive back up with random data, repeating over and over.

I’m leaning toward the physical angle, though either approach would get the job done for her purposes. But which would be quicker, which would make, if you were this lady, you more inclined to hire me for other things? Banging away on all the keyboards, loading software from a USB stick one at a time or physically destroying the hard drives? Guess I ought to sacrifice one my own drives for practice.

Fire is not an option by the way. Thanks fellas.

Doug Simmons

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