In regard to: [Networker] Old Equipment, Tammie Robertson said (at 2:12pm...:

>What do you all typically do with old backup equipment, drives and tapes?

Our university has a surplus auction periodically, where the public can
do silent bids on any equipment that's been surplussed.

We've never had a formal policy regarding equipment that could contain
user data (old tapes, hard drives) but as long as I've been in the Server
Group I've always made sure that nothing that could have user data could
get outside of our control without some moderate level of data
"cleansing".  We now have a security officer on staff that's starting to
set more rigid policies regarding how we have to dispose of stuff that
could have user data.

We will probably begin incinerating all old tapes.  We will likely wipe
old hard drives (if it's convenient) using some free or low-cost tool
(``wipe'' for Linux is what we're going to try first) or destroy them
(drill-through) if it's not.

Since I work on a campus that happens to have a chemistry department with
some NMR equipment that generates very strong magnetic fields (up to 9+
tesla, which I'm told is more than 90,000 gauss), I'm lobbying for using
the side-effect of the NMR equipment to wipe our tapes, so they are also
able to be surplussed or donated.

So, any spooks on the list that know about how many gauss we would need to
expose various tape formats to, to completely scramble the tape contents?
Would the tapes even be useable after exposure to enough of a field to
render the data on the tapes unrecoverable?

Tim
--
Tim Mooney                              mooney AT dogbert.cc.ndsu.NoDak DOT edu
Information Technology Services         (701) 231-1076 (Voice)
Room 242-J6, IACC Building              (701) 231-8541 (Fax)
North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58105-5164

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