RFI: Rcover files from old hard drives and laptops?

[randyho]

So, reframed question... drill holes in the drives? before throwing away? or is that even something to be concerned with at this point?

Drill holes, then bend the platter.

[Dov]

I, personally, would be reluctant to throw away personal information in an uncontrolled way. Of course I am being paranoid (to the point where I burn paper mail related to financial issues or firearms, instead of just tossing those into the recycling bin), but then again I have seen several times people looking over the content of old drives they got their hands on from somewhere else just for the fun of it.

The last time I checked, the only method accepted by US DoD for retiring old hard drives was the physical destruction of them. Other organizations may be happy with just full disk encryption. Best practice, however, would be to encrypt the drive before starting to use it. SSD's that have been used without encryption and later encrypted may be tricky, as some parts of the drive may be retired from use by the drive itself, and those bits are pretty much invisible for normal disk management tools. So if you have an unencrypted SSD drive and later encrypt it, bits and pieces of your data may remain unencrypted, and someone with specialized tools may find it.

Yeah there are always tradeoffs but figured original poster had a basic grasp of their personal risk assessment, and unless you are a celebrity or something I don't think most avg people are going to be targeted by someone with time and drive to do serious data recovery of discarded drives.

Even then if they want critical data from you there are easier ways to get it with less time delay.

Most of the cases I know about where they do serious data recovery of discarded drives are ether gov orgs or white hat researchers.

I think for most individuals worrying much about that is about like worrying about criminals picking locks, when they generally just kick doors in.

[gringop]

For spinning drives I just disassemble them (Torx screws), remove the neodymium magnets and throw the platters away. The magnets I can always find a use for after bending the steel holders flat (refrigerator magnets).

Gringop

[Guerrero]

I may just have to junk all this stuff.

I just threw my old drives into trash after removing them from the computer. You could try using a strong magnet (assuming we are dealing with magnetic drives and not SSDs) in an attempt to wipe data.

You may want to remove the rare-earth magnets. They're fun to play with.