Maybe a primitive lathe?
If they were stacked up, put in a pressure pot, and soaked in resin I know a guy that would turn them into a bowl or something.
I can offer a little bit of experience with large magnets. I have an electromagnetic, AC-powered tape eraser beefy enough to completely erase any audio recording tape up to 1/2" (on a 13" reel) and up to 1" if you turn it over and do it again (same thing that I tell my gf).
However, it doesn’t work at all on some videotape formulations. I presume it’s not powerful enough for some magnetic recording media.
So if you use this method, it would be necessary to verify that the data has been erased.
Personally, I’d just take scissors to them mothers. Take the disk material out of the enclosure, whatever it is, and ordinary scissors can cut it into several bite-sized pieces.
Can we assume this factual question has been answered and veer off a bit: What data from someone that has been dead for almost 20 years would you need to protect from the garbage can surfing tweakers that also happen to have the 20 year old technology required to recover that data?
Personally, I’d just break them all (it’s not too hard to break 3.5" enclosures) and crease the actual disk or use a pair of scissors.
I tried breaking CD-ROM discs to destroy them. Harder than you’d think and the shreds fly everywhere.
CD-ROMs are more difficult without a pair of gloves and doing it within something that contains the shrapnel. 5.25 and 3.5" floppies are easier. A pair of tin snips would do them in.
I would not trust a magnet, I had a friend who was in the Vice Squad and they took a truckload of VHS blue movies (same principal?) and put them under a huge magnet used for picking up car bodies in a scrap yard only to find that most were unaffected.
Like I and others were saying – if this is an existential threat, burn that shit to the ground. You don’t need a hydraulic press, which I’m not even convinced with necessarily be effective. Like how difficult is it to burn something to smithereens? No, not environmentally friendly, but if it comes to self-preservation, I don’t give a damn.
On the other hand, for 99.99999% of things I’d want to destroy data for, I’d just toss the floppies in the bin. Who in the hell is going to go through the landfill looking for old 3.5" and 5.25" inch floppies, hoping to glean some random data from there, and having the means to retrieve them? I would have no problem just chucking old floppy disks with random financial data out in the Thursday collection.
But if I’m worried to the point of needing to irrevocably destroying them? Burn, baby, burn. If the media is melted into a glob, good luck! How much more final can you be?
Exactly. Just like I also said upthread.
In my world, I’d take them to the town dump and drop them into one of the big containers that gets hauled to a landfill.
If i was worried the KGB was after them and the world would be destroyed if they found them, I’d pull out the mylar medium (easy with 5", maybe use that child bath and a hammer for the 3.25") and shred the mylar. I suspect my home shredder would be good enough.
I fed a spindle of CD-ROMs through my bandsaw one time.
Would not do again.
Many paper shredders can handle CDs just fine.
I mean, if we’re gonna be like that, I said burn 'em in a fire about a dozen posts above yours. And then @paulmarkj said that four above that one. Credit where credit is due.
Cool. Yes it’s the best way.
Just so you know, on re-read, my response sounds way the hell more aggressive to me than I indented. I was chuckling when I wrote it, then realized there may be some (in my head) context clues clues missing. I do apologize.
Apparently no one participating in this thread is a fan of the “Will it Blend?” videos that Blendtec has long produced for our amusement and edification.
I don’t see a video specifically about floppy disks, but they’ve used their blender to annihilate an iPad and an iPhone, so I should think some floppy disks would be well within its capabilities.
There’s no point denying it now, I can see your bite marks.
No worries, it’s all good.
I didn’t mean to suggest the bandsaw didn’t work. Just that the shiny little bits went everywhere.
Toxic fumes, man. Saving the free world isn’t worth the toxic fumes you’ll generate.
But saving your own ass might be.