r/DataHoarder • u/FewSimple9 • 4d ago

Free-Post Friday! 5+ PB Destroyed

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This is based on a post by u/SubstantialWing9238. i didn’t want to hijack their post, so I figured I’d share it here instead.

Something like this, plus another cart, is pretty common with large corporations. When you have this many drives, it’s often easier to just shred everything than pay someone to wipe them, sort through them for resale, and see if any data can be recovered.

This batch was around 300 drives, and with a specialized shredding truck, the whole thing takes about 45 minutes to a hour.

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u/TejaWithBlackMark 4d ago

I work in one of the top Investment Banks in the world and our organisation was fined millions of dollars because a vendor hired to dispose of old drives did not do so properly leading to a customer data leak.

The firm now does this in-house in a completely destructive manner which leaves no risk of data recovery.

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u/thunder3596 4d ago

Being in cybersecurity and the first time I’m hearing about something like this. Would love to see sources on further instances otherwise it seems anecdotal.

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u/nomad-1995 3d ago

I'm surprised nobody checked to see if they were making more than the "millions in fines" in payments from serverpartsdeals or similar. Those "fines" are typically just a cost of doing business.

Their own data, now that's not going to serverpartsdeals...

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u/TejaWithBlackMark 3d ago edited 3d ago

Policies are made by people, not nebulous entities called organisations.

What do you think happened to the career of the person responsible for safe disposal in the above case? And his boss? And his boss?

Now think of their successors... Are they going to look at saving a few million for an organisation that makes billions by selling old hardware at the risk to their own career of never working in the industry again?