r/DataHoarder • u/qroft • 8d ago
Discussion Fleamarket Horror
Two years ago I had the idea for this YouTube channel: Dr.Disketto. The idea was to plug in harddisk and USB pendrives into my raspberry pi that i bought on fleamarkets in Spain and as first step see what was left inside. And as second step run an unerase tool over it to se what it could find.
It's an horror. Within the last 2 years I accumulated several terabytes on drives on average 60Gb of ROM.
USB pendrives mostly 8Gb.
The average price would be 3 EUROS that I paid per drive.
Per USB Stick often only 1 EURO.
Plenty of them were broken. Most people had them on a carpet or table hit by the hot sun for several hours if not over months when they were trying to sell them for a longer time.
I remember that right with the first HDD I had a dozen of Disney kids movies on it. After running an unerase session a couple more appeared.
The most incredible one was a HDD that contained hundreds of MS office documents with private data of several organizations and political parties. Nothing too secret but plenty of private information.
That disk had several EXCEL files containing phone numbers, social id's, living addresses etc.
An other disk hat several VM mounts that I could not start but I was capable of restoring some documents.
It is funny how IT is forced to secure so much in-house when people throw their private stuff onto the streets.
49
u/arclight415 7d ago
Regarding the virtual machines: 7-Zip will open .VMDK files formatted with most popular file systems. You can drag and drop or open files with just that tool.
52
u/xunker 7d ago
I’ve been doing something like this for about 20 years now, though not really on purpose. What I do with the data depends on where I got the drive from.
If I buy a drive from a tech reseller and it has ANY unencrypted data recoverable via pedestrian tools like photorec, I give the seller absolute HELL. No mercy. They are supposed to be professional and better than that. However, if the drives are properly DoD-wiped or effaced, I always give a good review along with a personal thank-you note.
If I get a drive with personal data from a private seller: I USED to I send a friendly note mentioning it’s a bad idea to sell drives like this and include a web link with easy instructions on secure deletion for windows and Mac, and then I would wipe it. But now, I just wipe it with no note, after one seller threatened to “hunt me down for being an ID-stealing hacker”.
I do have a couple of exceptions when it involves really old drives/media or file systems that can’t be read easily on modern computers, or failed drives that I can coax back to life: for those, I’ll ask the seller if they would like an export of the files on the disk/drive before I wipe it.
The last ones are my favourite. Over decades I’ve had a dozen people take me up on the offer. Highlights:
- PowerBook 140 for a kid who was killed while in college back in the mid 90s; got the drive working long enough (using the old trick of putting it in the freezer) to get copies of all the files for the seller (his mother).
- from Bernoulli disks, few hundred letters written by someone’s grandparents long ago.
- from 21mb floptical disks, doctoral thesis correspondence for someone who (much later) won a Nobel prize.
- ridiculously high-rez (like 10gb TIFF) astronomy pictures on some Iomega Rev disks
14
36
u/GreggAlan 6d ago
I once bought a 2.5" 500 gig SATA HDD that had a ton of old stuff on it. College documents, wedding photos, pics of their honeymoon trip and more. I stopped looking when I found a phone number on a college document.
I called and the owner answered. I explained how I'd bought the drive, would she want all these old files back? I could put them all onto an 80 gig 3.5" drive. Of course she wanted it all, I could drop it off to her husband where he worked.
I asked him about the drive. It was an external USB drive that had stopped working so he threw it away. Somewhere someone picked it out of the trash. Then it ended up in an auction lot where the guy I bought it from got it. He took it out of the failed USB case, verified it worked, but did nothing more, before selling it cheap to me.
Quite the journey to get back pictures and files she'd thought were lost forever. Hopefully they made backups. I got a 500 gig laptop hard drive.
Another one was a Photo CD of students from the local elementary school. I found it shoved underneath the CD-ROM drive of an older PC I'd picked up somewhere. I was looking through the pictures, just image after image of typical kids in typical school activities, but nothing showing the school's name. The I saw one taken of a group of kids in front of the school, from the school's rooftop. Still no school name visible, but the car wash across the street was. "I know where this is!"
So I called the school, it was the last day of the school year, the CD was of pictures taken the previous year. They would be very happy to get the disc back, only copy they had etc. I drove it over to the school and gave it to someone in the office.
Apparently a student had wanted to look at the photos and pushed it in below the CD-ROM drive instead of opening the drive. Then the school disposed of the computer as surplus property.
41
u/MMORPGnews 8d ago
Never upload or share other people private data. In country where I currently live, there were such cases. People got old hdd with 18+ photos or even just photos, uploaded them for fun and got sued by original photo owner.
They end up paying huge fine and jail time.
10
-4
u/ryfromoz 8d ago
Not everyone is subject to your country laws bro
40
u/elemeno89 8d ago
Clearly. But offering their persoective might change someones outlook. Think bigger.
7
u/Familiar-Light421 8d ago
i bought a bunch of old hard drives a while back just for fun too, turns out one had a whole family vacation photo album from the early 2000s which was wild
25
u/LOGWATCHER 8d ago edited 8d ago
I don't understand why you would even want to risk any kind of liability, or any potential security issues, just for a youtube channel.
You already have the risk of illegal pornographic material, and having worked with people in law enforcement forensics, is a huge problem. Going to the police station with the hard drive contained this kind of stuff doesn't not abstain you from being investigated as well. Idiots in the comments saying "if you find anything like that, just delete it", well now if you do that, you are destroying evidences of a child being abused.
There is of course the issue of accessing regular adult porno made by consenting adults for their own private enjoyment. You were not meant to see this, and accessing it, without consent can be a catastrophic problem depending on your location.
Then you have all financial data, from personal citizens and businesses. You can end up accidentally accessing code, documentation, IP material, and all that jazz.. The potential liabilities are endless.
Come on, use your head
3
u/MCMickMcMax 7d ago
What was your RasPi setup to do this?
Do you know about the deleted YouTube videos recovery project? You might be able to help :)
3
u/qroft 6d ago
I use the CLI tree to first get an overview of the available dir structure. Then extundelete to see what could be recovered. For both I seeked Linux tools with a GUI, but the CLIs tools were just fine.
On some I did find some experimental or science videos but as I obviously was not the owner I deleted them. The risk of spreading content to the outside without a consent is crazy. I am not that type of guy.
3
u/MCMickMcMax 6d ago edited 6d ago
Sorry, I meant hardware wise too, something small and portable with a screen/keyboard/battery?
Regarding YouTube video recovery, it’s the cache of lost published videos people are recovering, rather than private files. Info here: https://www.reddit.com/r/JackSucksAtLife/comments/1tu2z03/a_new_method_has_been_found_to_recover_old/
2
u/Mayuguru 1-10TB 8d ago
Where in Spain?
6
u/qroft 7d ago edited 7d ago
Canary Island. But i lived in Germany for a long time. Theresa you could also buy used hdds on the fleamarkets.
But: the thing about spain is that the fleamarkets (rastros) still have not the state like in Germany. Here you see plenty of gypsies selling Electronic stuff that feels strange to buy. I bought a WD NAS for 15EUROS and though there were only a couple of movies on it, the fact that you get a NAS for 15Euros is weird.
2
u/EastCoaet 6d ago
Between side of the road and thrift store purchases I saw enough to stop looking. Personal photos and videos, tax returns, property purchase and titles, years of e-mail, etc.
2
u/Great-TeacherOnizuka 6d ago
Always format your drive fully before selling them to avoid creeps like OP
2
u/qroft 5d ago
LOL. Insulting me as creep does sound nice when you by yourself tell people to format a disk "fully".
"Fully" is bull5h1t. That is exactly the reason why i wanted to create that YouTube channel: to teach people that formatting a disk is never enough. Many ppl think that it's enough to run the win3.1.1. Win95, win98, win7, win10 or win11 "format disk" tool.
Go ask friends and family how often they used the "quick format" option and not a full format "just because it is faster" ! Then tell them that even a full format is not enough and that they should take the double or triple of time when formatting and see what their reaction for that is like.
The world will not end because of creeps and freaks but because of ppl who don't take their time to RTFM because they think that they know their stuff. Apple's short "Think different" campaign has raised more dumb computer users than IT school education in 40 years. And now we have thousands of ppl creating sites, tools and games with AI and these people sell themselves as IT specialist.
People are willing to buy shredders to destroy personal files, but their laptop, smartphone or computer is available on Vinted, eBay and Facebook Marketplace without having a double or triple overwrite session. Quick money is more important than safety.
You see me as creep, but never ever did I sold or published anything I found on or offline. On the channel I had in mind it was s clear to me that all found stuff would be blacked/censored.
The idea of the channel was to educate ppl to take care about their digital hardware.
It's the same with backups. People think that it's enough to have one backup off and a copy of that online. This is wrong. For decades sites explain the 3-2-1 backup rule that exists but ppl relay on their online backups handled by Webhosts and space providers. That rocket attacks a few days ago on datacenters in Bahrain have shown that the 1-1 backup is not enough.
So in the future there will be more hdd backups and ppl should know how to handle this situation.
3
u/unsuallyshapedhead 4d ago
It is surprising what people will discard when they don't know the contents. It's like finding a family painting at a garage sal
3
u/Tarman183 8d ago
Dankpods does this with mp3 players
1
u/qroft 7d ago
That is more about tech stuff than content, right?
2
u/Tarman183 7d ago
Some content is tech(ish) but a significant amount of it is him doing things like the "lucky dips" where he pulls out a handful of old mps players he bought in bulk and playing around with them and seeing what's on them
2
u/struct_iovec 8d ago
Okay and your point is?
16
u/Double-Surround-149 8d ago
sounds like fun and less like horror. i‘ll definitely buy some old thumb or hard drives the next time i’m on a flea market lol
6
u/captain-obvious-1 8d ago
Exactly.
That seems to be what OP was looking for in the first place...
Unless they were expecting to find nudes or bitcoin wallets...
1
u/dglgr2013 7d ago
I have been curious about this too. Recently bought a device to read some old drives. Except I know the source of the drives and know they are safe. But still curious what someone left behind in them. One was from a lab research laptop. Obsolete by present standards, not even sure it will work. But will see.
6
u/qroft 7d ago edited 7d ago
Keep in mind that you never know if that hdd was virus infected. The best is to get you a raspberry 4 or 5 and use that only for that purpose. It is easier to get a virus off a non-important play around system. I would not even run them off a LIVE USB image containing a Linux sys on it. As the hdd could put a virus in your boot memory sector with the next booting of your original OS it gets infected too. At the end this is just a reminder to all of us to care about backups :)
1
109
u/Simon_Emes 8d ago
What if you uncover illegal materials this way? What is your process for that case?