It would be if there weren’t other methods that work just as well, without creating the fumes. It’s not that much more work to remove the media, and once you remove it from the protective sleeve, it’s very easy to destroy.
Good point. There is that consideration.
¿Por qué no los dos?
I bought a shredder at Staples that will easily handle floppy things. You might need to pull off the metal piece.
I’ve been known to shoot old hard drives.
Wouldn’t putting them in the oven at 400 for an hour or so do the trick? It’s safer than burning them, but it should demagnetize and melt them pretty effectively.
I wouldn’t want to eat the next meals made in that oven after it was used for melting a heap of plastic. I also wouldn’t want to have the fumes in my kitchen.
I was a long-time PalmPilot user. And lover. They were great! But then their quality really went bad. I got frustrated. So I saved these two old models knowing I’d take them to a range and put them out of their misery.
BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!
But might possibly give off toxic fumes. At least with a fire, outdoors, you don’t have to be close.
But then there’s what @puzzlegal said upthread…
You can get a microwave oven for $10 at a garage sale. If you have a house you also have a backyard and a long extension cord. Introduce Mean Mr. Microwave to all the little Floppies out there in the yard and all will be well. The whole thing fits in the trash very neatly when you’re done.
That’s exactly where the microwave would have ended up had you not bought it. So you’re not creating an ecological mess, you’re merely rearranging exactly how and when it matures.
ISWYDT
I agree with those who advocated just using the floppies in a floppy disk drive. Try to find drives from the 70s to speed up the process. Of course that usually ruins the directory track(s) or a random track here or there but leaves all the data intact on the disk. And some of those disks recorded at such low rates that you could read the data with magnetic reveal fluid. I forget what that stuff was called. We used it to examine 9-track tape blocks and it could be used to look at track and block placement on high density floppies. So short of burning and melting you can degauss the disk with a strong magnet. You can also dissolve them in many substances. Acetone will do it but not quickly, methyl ethyl ketone would be faster. But if you don’t have those handy just butter up that disk with model glue or plastic cement (usually MEK with some styrene filler) and fold it up.
I think it’s been beaten to death, but…
The question is - how bady does your nemesis want to read this? Just making the disks unusable by the average Joe with a moderate level of tech at their disposal should be adequate; hence, cuts and taking chunks out of floppies.
Modern hard disks (for assorted versions of “modern”) the heads float on a cushion of air; so the disks are hermetically sealed, with possible extremely tiny leaks to equalize pressure. Even 20 or 30 years ago, the warning was that something as small as a smoke particle would lodge between head and disk and scratch the magnetic media to be unreadable. Drilling a hole or holes through the metal case meant it was useless. (my previous employer had a drill press in the repair shop for this). There was the news item years ago that passengers on the train to Tibet which got to an extreme altitude were having laptop disk failures - the air pressure at 13,000 feet was too low to “fly” the disk heads.
For floppies, if you want to avoid the possibility that someone will tape a cut on the disk and try - possibly succeed - cut segments out, maybe dispose separately.
If someone is determined, there are scientific labs (or the NSA) that will for a nice fee, retrieve what they can of the magnetic record that remains. If this bothers you, magnetic and heat destruction is the only recourse.
CD’s are easy to make unreadable - take a sharp object and scratch the back - you will be gouging the recording media. The more scratches the better, keeping in mind the main directory and such is closest to the spindle hole. Using tin snips to cut the disk - or a shredder - will further render them useless, unless the NSA wants your fragments. I haven’t tried it, but CD and DVD writeables use a laser to write, so I’m going to guess that extreme heat will also render the media unreadable. Commercial DVDs media are deposited metal, but then if the thing was mass-produced, what are you hiding?
My experience is that the passage of time will render most CD writeable disks unreadable.
Depends how badly someone wants to read it. Apparently blast furnace temperatures and them burying it for 2000 years doesn’t stop some people.
I taught middle school science for many years. Once, in planning to show a video tape from home in class the next day, I put it in my briefcase to bring to school. I forgot that I had also put a strong magnet in my briefcase earlier in the day. When I got to school and tried to play the tape, there was virtually nothing on the tape. And of course I discovered the reason. I’m guessing that a strong magnet rubbed on the floppy would erase anything on it.
Maybe. See my upstream post #61. Not all magnetic materials have the same coercivity. Some are harder to erase than others.
Some teenage friends of mine described a prank they pulled… (not at all endorsing this). They rigged up a cassette tape gluing a magnet just before the take-up reel, so it would erase when it played. There was a girl who was annoying the heck out of them (never heard the details why) so they recorded a message full of mean insults and threats, and gave her the tape to play. Of course, she played it and then went crying to someone (Principal? Parents?) and when she played it back there was nothing on the tape.
These guys were no dummies, they tested the process first to be sure. But apparently it worked.
If the Free World can’t survive the fumes generated by burning a shoebox full of zip disks,* then it’s so moribund that letting the disks be found and read would kill it, anyway.
*Iomega really was playing god when they released those whimsically colored, translucent zips back in '98, weren’t they? “It was all the fashion! How were WE supposed to know the Bondi Blue pigment was made of enriched Cobalt-Thorium G?”
I used a degausser. It was originally purchased to erase cassette tapes.
Make certain your phone isn’t in your pocket.
You don’t want to be near any computer equipment.
I pulled 10 erased hard drives from pcs at work before they went to the recycling center. I went outside after work and had a lot of fun throwing each drive against the sidewalk several times. Then.they were thrown out.
My bosses wanted the drives physically destroyed.