I have about 50 to 100 old floppy disks that belonged to a relative who died in 2005. I have reason to believe that there may be sensitive data on the disks that I do not wish to possess and do not wish for anyone to possess. The disks range from ancient 5" disks, old 3.5" disks, and even some ZipDisks.
What are ways to destroy these disks in a way that the data cannot be recovered by anyone, ever? I tried putting a 5" disk in an ordinary paper shredder and it mangled it pretty well, but it also clogged up the shredder. I have a fireplace and an outdoor fire bowl, but I am concerned that the fumes generated by burning may be dangerous and that the melted remains could damage the fireplace or the fire bowl.
I’ve destroyed 5.25" and 3.5" disks by removing the actual platters from the sleeves and shredding them in a paper shredder. The platters are thin plastic material that should not clog the machine.
You don’t need to physically destroy them. A powerful magnet, or a degaussing electromagnet is suffiicent to scramble the information on any magnetic diskette, and for the 5.25 inch and 3.5 inch floppies, a standard kitchen magnet that you’d use for holding bags in sous vide would be sufficient. I don’t know about the ZipDisk since there are a few different types and I’ve never tried to erase one but a few seconds in a powerful degausser should scramble it to nonsense. These are more difficult to find now that CRTs are virtually obsolete but if you can find an older computer or appliance repair shop they probably have one in on a shelf somewhere. Or take it down to your local high school and ask the bored physics teacher if they would have some of their craftier students build an induction coil to scramble your data.
I’d think any way to make a cut from the edge of the disk to the center would render them useless. Wether you put them in a vice and use a hacksaw, bolt cutter, metal band cutter, etc.
Honestly, at this point, you probably don’t even need to. Even if anyone ever went to the effort of digging out a floppy drive, they’ve probably succumbed to age by now.
But if you want to be absolutely sure, then anything you do to the actual floppy round part will be enough. You could probably stack up a bunch of them and run a drill through the stack without too much difficulty.
It depends on what you’re trying to protect against. If you just want to make sure some high school kid doesn’t find them in the trash and stick them in his dad’s old disk drive, then any of the above solutions is probably ok (athough I’d be wary of relying on a demagnetization method since you can’t easily tell whether it worked). If you want to make sure the NSA can’t read them, then you need to be a bit more thorough. Casual demagnetizing would almost certainly leave some of the data still readable, and damaging only a part of the disk would still allow someone with the proper equipment to read some of the data. Commercial shredder services would take them, but you’d have to pay for that. I’d be fairly comfortable with removing the platters from the sleeves and running them through a shredder, but when this actually happened to me after a relative died, I took them to a commercial shredding service.
I’ve recently pulled data off of 3.5 inch floppies that are 25+ years old, and we had an outside vendor pull data off of tapes that were even older with a pretty decent volume of recovered data. Magnetic tape and ‘floppy’ disk media certainly does degrade but there is no guarantee that it won’t be useable.
If the data was so compromising that I didn’t think just mixing them in with used kitty litter was good enough, I’d find a remote camp site and burn them in the fire pit.
oohh…I loves me a good mystery!!!
What kind of data from 20 years ago is so dangerous? For you and for everyone else.?
No specifics,of course, but geez, I wanna know just a little bit–is it financial, or sexy, or cold-case material for a TV show?
(mods: we’re more than 10 posts into this thread, so a little humor is legit, ain’t if?)