Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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RMAing a large HDD that has pirated movies/games on it, is it necessary to completely zero the drive? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by silvio_dante@alien.top to c/datahoarder@selfhosted.forum

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The manufacturer requires that the faulty HDD be sent back. It's 18 TB, so ShredOS estimates 100 hours to completely wipe the drive. I really would rather not go through that. Does anyone else have experience with this?

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[–] bofh2023@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

No one cares. I'd quick format it and call it a day. There's no chain of custody so it's never proof of anything in any sense that matters.

[–] silvio_dante@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Yeah, this is the rational line of thinking honestly. I just overly worry.

[–] 3legdog@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I'm pretty sure the oem is not hooking up every rma drive and looking for files.

"well, new rma drive? Let's pop it in the USB caddy and see what's there... Hmm, some files... jpgs... Mpegs... Oh look. Pdfs with embedded viruses. Good thing we didn't connect this drive to... Oops"

They're sending that thing straight to the industrial degausser and then certification for possible resale.

[–] bofh2023@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

As company policy? No. But their employees are people too.

I used to work for a large ISP that shall remain nameless. The ISP abuse department absolutely DID look at every pub ftp they were told to shut down, and grabbed whatever they found interesting before shutting it down. There may even have been a massive MP3 share on one of their servers to store their ill-gotten gains.

Absolutely NOT company policy, but it happened.

But the question here is: should OP worry about his 'linux isos' getting him in trouble. Even accounting for overly curious employees, the answer is still NO.

[–] 3legdog@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

There may even have been a massive MP3 share

I never understood the "gotta have 'em all" mentality of mp3 collecting.

"Hey! Check out my massive collection of bitrate/dynamic range/frequency range -decimated music. I don't need CDs anymore."

[–] s00mika@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

With your logic we would not have recertified drives.