Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
Speaker 1: tech Stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello again, everyone,
Speaker 1: welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Polett and
Speaker 1: I am an editor at how stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: Sitting across from me as always as senior writer Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you've got the whole picture, but
Speaker 1: he's not exactly working at all Thrusters. We still haven't
Speaker 1: started receiving mail about where I get these quotes from,
Speaker 1: so I'm curious to hear once those started coming in.
Speaker 1: Actually I'm sure I'll be buried under an avalanche. But
Speaker 1: that leads me to a little actual listener mail. This
Speaker 1: mail comes from Griffin. So, first of all, Griffin, you
Speaker 1: have a really cool name, and here is the mail. Hi,
Speaker 1: I just wanted to send you a note about deleting
Speaker 1: files on a computer. Your recent data recovery podcasts correctly
Speaker 1: mentioned that when you delete a file or empty the
Speaker 1: trash on your computer, it really just deletes the pointers
Speaker 1: and the data is still there. Sometimes. However, both Mac
Speaker 1: os ten and Windows XP have newer and newer versions
Speaker 1: have easy to use secure erase features. If you turn
Speaker 1: these on or run a secure a race free space feature,
Speaker 1: it will actually overwrite the deleted files space with zeros.
Speaker 1: Your os can't find it anymore no matter what. Even so,
Speaker 1: the U. S. Department of Defense prescribes that this be
Speaker 1: done seven times before it is considered safe, and even
Speaker 1: then there are higher specifications for safe deleting without destroying
Speaker 1: the physical media. There are also software available that can
Speaker 1: cause physical damage to a drive and its platters using
Speaker 1: things like vibrations caused by repeated looping instructions. Software can
Speaker 1: make a drive head shatter or heat up the drive platter.
Speaker 1: Fun huh. Anyway, just wanted to share some additional knowledge
Speaker 1: with you. Hope your summer is as great as mine. Well,
Speaker 1: thanks a lot, Griffin. We're actually going to do a
Speaker 1: podcast about permanently delete being files because we had several
Speaker 1: people ask us about that after we did our data
Speaker 1: recovery podcast and you've kind of covered some of the basics. Uh. Yes,
Speaker 1: when you delete a file, what you're really doing is
Speaker 1: deleting a pointer to that data, right, Because if you
Speaker 1: just drag a file to your recycled band or trash
Speaker 1: can and tell it to delete it. It, you know,
Speaker 1: gets it off of your hard drive, and and basically
Speaker 1: when it removes the pointers, it's making that space available
Speaker 1: to be written over again. But typically if if all
Speaker 1: you're doing is just deleting it under the normal circumstances, Um,
Speaker 1: I will explain why I say that. In a moment. Um,
Speaker 1: all you're doing is saying, yes, you can go ahead
Speaker 1: and take these two megabytes or whatever, and next time
Speaker 1: you need space, feel free to go ahead and write
Speaker 1: over this, because I don't need that anymore. But it
Speaker 1: does not actually remove the file completely from your hard drive. Right. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, if you delete something, then it may
Speaker 1: be possible to retrieve it using data retrieval software. Delete
Speaker 1: software essentially is what it's usually referred to as, which
Speaker 1: is really useful. If you go, oh, no, I can't
Speaker 1: believe I just deleted that. Yeah, I can't believe it.
Speaker 1: Sometime my term paper. I mean I've accidently deleted articles.
Speaker 1: I've done that. Yes, I've accidentally deleted articles when I
Speaker 1: got angry. Um no, that's a joke. Please don't send
Speaker 1: anyone to me. Uh the Yeah, So, if you delete
Speaker 1: something by accident, there are ways to retrieve it, assuming
Speaker 1: you haven't, you know, downloaded new information and had that
Speaker 1: that those old files overwritten by your computer. Uh. And
Speaker 1: if you remember our podcast about hard drives and how
Speaker 1: hard drives save information to the physical media, you'll remember
Speaker 1: they don't necessarily do it sequentially. Actually, platter based ones
Speaker 1: don't do it sequentially at all, at least not in
Speaker 1: most file systems. Right. Yeah, we did mention that older
Speaker 1: DOS versions do, like the ones that were used by NASA,
Speaker 1: do save it sequentially. But in your average hard drive system,
Speaker 1: your data is being saved willingly in a way that
Speaker 1: kind of sort of makes sense, but it's not necessarily sequential.
Speaker 1: So when you over when you're saving you data, there's
Speaker 1: no guarantee that you're actually overwriting old files. You may
Speaker 1: be saving that too unoccupied space on your hard drive.
Speaker 1: So uh, it may even be that something that you
Speaker 1: deleted months ago is still sitting on your computer. That's true,
Speaker 1: And this is important because whereas a few weeks ago
Speaker 1: we were talking about how you can save files that
Speaker 1: have been seemingly deleted from your computer, let's say you
Speaker 1: actually want to make sure that something is gone for good.
Speaker 1: For example, you're selling your computer to someone else, or
Speaker 1: or donating it to to a charity, for example, for
Speaker 1: an older machine, and you think, wow, you know all
Speaker 1: those tax files I had on here, I'll just lead them. Well,
Speaker 1: if you just to lead them, they're not gonna be
Speaker 1: really gone. And it is possible that someone who is
Speaker 1: enterprising enough can go in and get very sensitive information
Speaker 1: such as here in the United States, your social security
Speaker 1: number or something else that could be used to steal
Speaker 1: your identity. So let's say that let's say that you're
Speaker 1: the I T head of a government office. Now, the
Speaker 1: information that's on the computers in your department may be
Speaker 1: extremely sensitive. In fact, some may be uh related to
Speaker 1: to national security. And so it's of utmost importance that
Speaker 1: you make sure that that data is completely destroyed when
Speaker 1: you are going to get rid of an old machine. Um.
Speaker 1: And so it becomes really important to know what's the
Speaker 1: process for deleting these files. Uh. So you wanna you
Speaker 1: want to get rid of something, you want to overwrite
Speaker 1: that data. You don't want to just um, just assume
Speaker 1: that when you delete something that's gone, how do you
Speaker 1: overwrite a file a specific file, Well, it depends on
Speaker 1: the computer system that you're using. This is true. UM,
Speaker 1: you know that what we were talking about earlier. Yes,
Speaker 1: the U for example, the Macintosh operating system with which
Speaker 1: I'm probably a little bit more familiar than Windows UM,
Speaker 1: although I've used Windows for many years now. UM actually
Speaker 1: has an option UM in the in the file menu
Speaker 1: when you're looking at the at the trash to you
Speaker 1: have the option of a racing or emptying your trash
Speaker 1: or secure empty trash, which is basically not only does
Speaker 1: it UM delete the files on those sectors on the
Speaker 1: hard drive, but it also overwrites them with ones and
Speaker 1: zeros multiple times in order to you know, obliterate those files.
Speaker 1: So it's it's going ahead and writing information, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: basically gibberish information to those sectors in an attempt to
Speaker 1: completely get rid of it. You can, and you can,
Speaker 1: as we were mentioning before, to do that in other
Speaker 1: operating systems. Yeah, in Linux, if you're if you're using Lenox,
Speaker 1: most distroys of Lenox have a shred command, and so
Speaker 1: your shred command shredding is it's essentially what it sounds
Speaker 1: like when you're you're physically shredding a document. The ideas
Speaker 1: that it's shredding the digital version. And again what it
Speaker 1: does is it it not only deletes the information from
Speaker 1: your hard drive, but overwrites it for you. And you
Speaker 1: can even adjust the number of times it it passes
Speaker 1: that information and overwrites it using various command line functions,
Speaker 1: so you could just overwrite at once, or you could
Speaker 1: set that overwrite number to a much higher number like
Speaker 1: seven or seven times. Is the Department of Defenses UH
Speaker 1: basic rule of thumb which Griffin mentioned. Um, there's also
Speaker 1: another approach called the Gutman method, Yes, which Gutman is UH.
Speaker 1: It's well, it's it's named after a technology expert who
Speaker 1: came up with thirty five different ways to overwrite UH data.
Speaker 1: Since then, it's his method has been kind of misinterpreted
Speaker 1: to mean that you need to overwrite data thirty five
Speaker 1: times to really obliterate it. That's kind of a misconception.
Speaker 1: That's not really what Gutman was saying, And in fact,
Speaker 1: Gutman u in Peter Gutman, I should say, it was
Speaker 1: a paper called Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and
Speaker 1: Solid state Memory that was the thing that kind of
Speaker 1: gave birth to this whole thirty five passes to truly
Speaker 1: erase the data so that you don't have to worry
Speaker 1: about data recovery specialists getting hold of it. Um that
Speaker 1: he He later wrote an addendum to that, an epilogue
Speaker 1: to the paper, which essentially said that two passes of
Speaker 1: random data should be enough to obliterate information. Uh. Some
Speaker 1: people suggest more because of the fear that future data
Speaker 1: recovery strategies will be able to get past that. There's
Speaker 1: also the possibility some people think that there may be
Speaker 1: a stability that because because it's a magnetic storage um
Speaker 1: uh media the classic hard drives at any rate, it's
Speaker 1: possible that empty sectors could have their bits aligned magnetically
Speaker 1: with other sectors. So even if you've overwritten one thing,
Speaker 1: there may be a trace ghost element of that old
Speaker 1: data on an empty sector, which theoretically you could detect
Speaker 1: if you had an electron telescope. Yeah that that kind
Speaker 1: of detection requires a certain amount of funding and expertise
Speaker 1: and patients. Um. The average consumer does probably does not
Speaker 1: need to worry about someone going after his or her
Speaker 1: computer with an electron microscope. It's just not gonna happen.
Speaker 1: And uh And some experts will tell you now, among
Speaker 1: them Craig Wright Dave Kleiman and Shyam Sundar that overwriting
Speaker 1: hard drive really you only need to do it once
Speaker 1: and that is enough because it will obliterate whatever the
Speaker 1: file was and and it won't. And while people have
Speaker 1: said that there are data recovery ways of getting past that,
Speaker 1: they say that the way that we store information magnetically, Now, uh,
Speaker 1: that's not really the case. That this whole seven pass
Speaker 1: this thing and thirty five pass this thing. These are
Speaker 1: all based on misconceptions and are really overkill. That being said,
Speaker 1: it really doesn't hurt you to over to overwrite multiple times.
Speaker 1: Another another method that people, some people have been using,
Speaker 1: and I don't know if you encountered this in your
Speaker 1: research or not, Jonathan, encrypted e racing. Yes, actually I
Speaker 1: saw a cool one called secure delete. This was a
Speaker 1: program which actually encrypts your file before you delete it
Speaker 1: and overwrite it, so that should someone have the ability
Speaker 1: to recover that data, they're going to recover an encrypted file.
Speaker 1: And encryption, if you are not familiar, basically is a
Speaker 1: way of encoding the file. UM. If they wanted to
Speaker 1: try to open it, they would be asked for a
Speaker 1: pass key UM and it could be something I mean
Speaker 1: really obnoxious or I don't even know if do you
Speaker 1: know if secure delete um actually tells the user what
Speaker 1: the code is, so it's encrypted with a key that
Speaker 1: no one knows. Yeah, it's like it's like you've been
Speaker 1: given a coded message but no key to to decode it.
Speaker 1: So that's I mean, that's the whole point. That's what
Speaker 1: makes it secure is if it if it did somehow
Speaker 1: provide you that key, then you would be able to
Speaker 1: decode the message and get back to the original file structure.
Speaker 1: But by keeping the key a secret, then it's out
Speaker 1: of an extra level of security. Now, so so you
Speaker 1: would have to be able to one retrieve the overwritten file,
Speaker 1: which is then encrypted, and then to break the encryption
Speaker 1: to get to the original file, which is I mean
Speaker 1: that's this is like like major secret service kind of
Speaker 1: stuff that that confounds really really smart people as opposed
Speaker 1: to people like me. I'm just I'm just smart. I'm
Speaker 1: not really really smart because I use terms like really
Speaker 1: really smart. Um. All right, then, well, um, but those
Speaker 1: are for individual files. Should we talk about ways to
Speaker 1: uh if you want to just go ahead and wipe
Speaker 1: the entire drive clean? Yeah, because if this is a
Speaker 1: good using these these methods are are good for Oh
Speaker 1: and yeah, we didn't really mention it, but yeah, Windows
Speaker 1: has it has their own They have their own their
Speaker 1: own programs as well, and some of those are like
Speaker 1: Griffins that are incorporated into the OS. But they are
Speaker 1: also products that you can purchase that will allow you
Speaker 1: to do this kind of thing, like BC wipe allows
Speaker 1: you to delete an overwrite individual files. Blanco file shredder
Speaker 1: lets you do that. It also lets you do folders,
Speaker 1: so you don't have to do it file by file.
Speaker 1: You can do an entire folder you want to um
Speaker 1: and then there are there are a few others. There's
Speaker 1: a race your hard Drive dot com which uses the
Speaker 1: d D method of racing doing seven passes. Department of Defense. Yes,
Speaker 1: thank you, Department of Defense. I'm we're on really good terms,
Speaker 1: so I just call him d D sometimes Dodd anyway.
Speaker 1: So yeah, there are also solutions for PCs. Now, if
Speaker 1: you don't if what you want to do is wipe
Speaker 1: the entire drive, because what you're doing is like what
Speaker 1: was saying, you want to get rid of your computer
Speaker 1: or perhaps you want to repurpose it or whatever, and
Speaker 1: you don't want whatever was on that computer to ever
Speaker 1: fall into someone else's hands. Um, yeah, you can, you can. Actually,
Speaker 1: there's several different methods of wiping everything off your hard
Speaker 1: drive and overwriting it so that, um, so that nothing remains.
Speaker 1: And some of those are again, uh, commercial products like
Speaker 1: killed disk is one. You can purchase killed disk and
Speaker 1: what it'll will do is it'll it'll erase and overwrite
Speaker 1: the dear hard drive, um multiple times, I think. And
Speaker 1: there are other products that do the same sort of thing.
Speaker 1: This is again what what the Department of Defense does
Speaker 1: if they're ever going to get rid of a machine. Now. Um,
Speaker 1: when we were talking earlier about Griffin's email about secure
Speaker 1: a race, that actually is uh not really platform specific.
Speaker 1: That's actually something that the hard drive manufacturers have been
Speaker 1: including in the firmware for the drives for a while now.
Speaker 1: And basically that means that there is some some information
Speaker 1: in the in the hard drive itself that if you
Speaker 1: know how to tap into that information, the drive will
Speaker 1: go ahead and delete everything on there securely. Um. The
Speaker 1: trick is they don't want to make that something that
Speaker 1: you can do easily by accident. Yeah, obviously that would
Speaker 1: be a bad thing. And this is a good time
Speaker 1: to actually mention that if you do ever need to
Speaker 1: wipe your hard drive um again, make a backup of
Speaker 1: your drive first. Uh. This kind of sounds like it's
Speaker 1: ridiculous and that you don't want to do that. But
Speaker 1: let's say that you've deleted the stuff that you don't
Speaker 1: want on your drive at all, um, and whether or
Speaker 1: not that those deletions have been overwritten or whatever, that
Speaker 1: that's kind of beside the point. If you if you
Speaker 1: make a backup of your hard drive, and then you
Speaker 1: are manually choosing which which bits of information, which files
Speaker 1: and programs you want to bring back onto your new
Speaker 1: device or either you're repurposed computer perhaps um, then you
Speaker 1: can avoid pulling over the stuff that you didn't want
Speaker 1: on there in the first place. But making a backup
Speaker 1: is important because once you wipe that, it wipes. Wiping
Speaker 1: a hard drive wipes everything. It's not just your documents
Speaker 1: or your files, it's also all your programs and even
Speaker 1: your operating system. So you'll in order to make your
Speaker 1: computer useful again, you will have to load in either
Speaker 1: copies of your old OS or a new OS. If
Speaker 1: you want to change your machines purpose, if you want
Speaker 1: to switch from a PC to a Linux based machine
Speaker 1: for example. UM So, yeah, you gotta keep that in
Speaker 1: mind too, that when you do these wipes, it's going
Speaker 1: to wipe everything, which is a good thing, as it
Speaker 1: turns out, if you want to really erase all traces
Speaker 1: of you know whatever, like again, if it's financial records
Speaker 1: or uh, corporate intellectual property, that kind of stuff, it's
Speaker 1: necessary to do that. Yes, secure race going back to
Speaker 1: that now with the work of Dr Gordon Hughes and
Speaker 1: a group called the Center from Magnetic Recording Research at
Speaker 1: the University of California at San Diego and UM actually
Speaker 1: secure race is uh so thorough that the National Security
Speaker 1: Agency and National Institute for Standards and Testing are behind
Speaker 1: using secure or a a race. Unfortunately, according to UM an
Speaker 1: article that I read by Robin Harris at ZD net,
Speaker 1: uh the n s A stopped supporting Dr hughes Is research.
Speaker 1: But you can still use um the secure race functionality
Speaker 1: of your machine. Now, if you're a conspiracy theorist, you say, hey,
Speaker 1: they're supporting this because it doesn't work and they want
Speaker 1: to be able to get to my data. I'm not
Speaker 1: a conspiracy theorist, No, of course, I don't know how
Speaker 1: you would have thought of that otherwise, But I just
Speaker 1: thought it was funny. I thought that heaving off the
Speaker 1: email like of course, that they're recommending you use this
Speaker 1: because that way they can they know the secret and
Speaker 1: they can get your data. First of all, they're way
Speaker 1: too many of us out there with computers. They can't
Speaker 1: be after all of us. It's just too time consuming.
Speaker 1: I mean, they don't even have the money or the
Speaker 1: man power to do that. So we just discount that immediately. Jonathan, Well, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry to use some critical thinking. It's I know
Speaker 1: it's so irritating. Um um, go ahead, I apologize. No, No No,
Speaker 1: we were us starting at the same time. If you
Speaker 1: want to wipe your entire drive clean for whatever reason, uh,
Speaker 1: you can't really be logged into your machine when you
Speaker 1: do it. You're gonna have to boot off of a CD.
Speaker 1: There's just no way around it, because well, yeah, you've
Speaker 1: got to boot off some kind of external drive source
Speaker 1: because if you are running your own computer at the time,
Speaker 1: it's gonna go put wait, I can't delete this because
Speaker 1: it's running right now. So you're gonna have to to
Speaker 1: to use some other form of disk and uh log
Speaker 1: into your machine, or you know, start your machine so
Speaker 1: that runs off the CD or the flash drive or
Speaker 1: an external driver. However you're doing it, a secondary drive
Speaker 1: in the machine probably would work, um if you do
Speaker 1: it right. And uh, that way you can actually run
Speaker 1: some of the utilities that we've been talking about, UM,
Speaker 1: either a block or racing program or secure a race
Speaker 1: or something else. UM. And that way you can actually
Speaker 1: you know, go ahead and write over those files, all right, Chris. Yes,
Speaker 1: Let's say that you're super secret agent and you're deep
Speaker 1: undercover and your cover has been blown and you know
Speaker 1: that they're after you, and you know that your computer
Speaker 1: is going to be seized. Odd. Sorry, I won't live
Speaker 1: to see tomorrow. Right, Okay, see, great agent man, they've
Speaker 1: given you a number and taken away your name. So
Speaker 1: number seven, you've you're deep undercover and they are out
Speaker 1: to get you. Number seven, number one is on your case.
Speaker 1: And so you want to get rid of all your data.
Speaker 1: You've overwritten your hard drive, but you want to take
Speaker 1: that one extra step. What can you do to absolutely
Speaker 1: guarantee there is no way they're going to get any
Speaker 1: data off that computer? Are you serious? I'm serious? Like
Speaker 1: you have overwritten it and so you've done everything electronically
Speaker 1: that you can do to get rid of the data,
Speaker 1: which is that's the next step, and that's important. That's
Speaker 1: a good first step. Yeah, if you're absolutely in, if
Speaker 1: you're pretty sure that nobody's going to get hold of
Speaker 1: this drive and try to pull the data from it, Uh,
Speaker 1: then you can use these electronic methods. But if you
Speaker 1: really really want to do this, if I'm trying to
Speaker 1: protect what's left of my what the remaining shreds of
Speaker 1: my secret agent work, um, I am going to remove
Speaker 1: keeping with the secret agent motif here, I'm going to
Speaker 1: remove the drive from the computer and shoot it with
Speaker 1: my Walter Walter PPK. Okay, so you're so you're I'm
Speaker 1: a secret agent, you're now a British secret agent. You
Speaker 1: know you didn't pick number seven and I had to
Speaker 1: fix my Walter. Okay, but you don't really need to
Speaker 1: shoot it. You're not gonna use your baretta. You can
Speaker 1: pull that. You can pull the hard you can pull
Speaker 1: the drive apart and take the platters and drill holes
Speaker 1: in the platters or scratch them up with something scratchy,
Speaker 1: or use an industrial shredder that or work. There are
Speaker 1: actual industrial shudders out there. Does line specifically to destroy
Speaker 1: media like DVDs, CDs and hard drive platters. Yes, and
Speaker 1: so all the stuff that we were telling you not
Speaker 1: to do, and the hard drive podcast dot data with
Speaker 1: every podcast. You can do that all you want. If
Speaker 1: you're trying to drop it, smash it, step on it,
Speaker 1: you know, grind it up. So the idea, Yeah, if
Speaker 1: you grind it up, you've pretty much guaranteed that there's
Speaker 1: not gonna be any no one's gonna get any debt
Speaker 1: off that thing. Suppose of it in one trash, can't
Speaker 1: part of it in one trash, can go downtown and
Speaker 1: get rid of the rest of it. Your credit cards
Speaker 1: and uh, you know all those pictures of all those
Speaker 1: those film fatals that you met up with a long
Speaker 1: while on your undercover spy Adventures on our spy Facebook profile. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can't even say their names because they're way too suggestive. Okay,
Speaker 1: then well, yeah, you look at the James Bond names
Speaker 1: of the women, and there are terrible, terrible shame on you,
Speaker 1: James Bond, shame on you, um at any rate. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: that is the ultimate step is if if in fact
Speaker 1: you need to destroy the physical media because of some reason,
Speaker 1: you know that there is some someone's out to get
Speaker 1: your data and you just want to make sure it's gone. Yeah, first,
Speaker 1: electronically override everything. Always do that first. Then you can
Speaker 1: look at your various ways of destroying it. And I've
Speaker 1: seen lots of different ones, like I like we mentioned before,
Speaker 1: I saw one that was an industrial sized drill press
Speaker 1: that would drill an enormous hole through an entire hard
Speaker 1: drive box. Or you can like disassemble the box, take
Speaker 1: the platters out and destroy them. Or if it's if
Speaker 1: it's a solid state, then you just take a hammer
Speaker 1: to it, just just smash it into tiny little pieces.
Speaker 1: It's good to be a gangster. Yeah, I'm sorry that
Speaker 1: I heard it was hard to be a gangster, um,
Speaker 1: but yeah, it's um. It's something that you're you you
Speaker 1: can actually do physically to to destroy the drive. And
Speaker 1: as we were talking about again, you know, they recovered
Speaker 1: a hard drive, They recovered information from a hard drive
Speaker 1: that had been recovered after the Space Shuttle crash. So
Speaker 1: you know, anything that you can do to eliminate this
Speaker 1: data from the drive, you want to do and that
Speaker 1: oh we know what we didn't touch on something in betweens.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, um, you know degaussing, and this is a tech.
Speaker 1: This is has to do with a famous German mathematician
Speaker 1: named Carl Friedrich gauss Um. He did a lot of
Speaker 1: work with mathematics, but also was very interested in the
Speaker 1: Earth's magnetic field. In fact, he invented the magnetometer. But
Speaker 1: a gauss is a unit of magnetic uh um, I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: I can't read magnetic conduction. See, this is what happens
Speaker 1: when I go back to paper. I can't read my
Speaker 1: own writing because I type all the time. Now. One
Speaker 1: gauss is the magnetic flux density required to create an
Speaker 1: electromegna motive force of an advolt in a centimeter of anyway. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so a unit of magnetic measurement. And basically when
Speaker 1: you degauss to drive, you're running magnets over it to
Speaker 1: try to change to try to eliminate the data by
Speaker 1: manipulating the magnetic field on the platters because of course
Speaker 1: hard drives are or the typical platter hard drive anyway
Speaker 1: is a magnetic storage medium. Yeah. Actually, um, and I
Speaker 1: wanted to bring this up because it's funny. The day
Speaker 1: we're recording this, uh, I actually saw a message on
Speaker 1: Twitter about someone who is going to do an experiment
Speaker 1: or wants to do an experiment with magnets and hard drives.
Speaker 1: And uh it's Patrick Norton, who's with Revision three. Um
Speaker 1: honestly of of many other shows before that as well. Yes,
Speaker 1: he used to be with tech TV. Uh and uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: Patrick Norton, whom I've met once, so Hi Patrick, Um.
Speaker 1: Patrick Norton is looking to be able to use a
Speaker 1: really powerful natural magnet to see if it can if
Speaker 1: he can wipe hard drive live on tech Zilla. Okay,
Speaker 1: of course there's a Revision three show now at the
Speaker 1: time of this recording that hasn't happened yet. I'm sure
Speaker 1: by the time this podcast comes out, Uh, they will
Speaker 1: have have shot that and uploaded it. So if if
Speaker 1: you guys want to see some of something like this
Speaker 1: happen in uh an actual life, you can go over
Speaker 1: to Revision three and look at Texilla and try and
Speaker 1: see if you can find the episode where Patrick Norton
Speaker 1: wipes out a hard drive with a really powerful magnet. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's that's pretty cool. Actually, what's happening today? Yeah? Today? Um,
Speaker 1: And just so you guys know, We don't normally talk
Speaker 1: about the day that we record the podcast, but this
Speaker 1: is Wednesday, August twenty. Yes, just to give you guys
Speaker 1: a kind of a reference point if you want to
Speaker 1: look up that taxilla thing. Yeah, so yeah, I can.
Speaker 1: I can attest to, uh, what will happen if you
Speaker 1: hold a twelve pound donut magnet up to a television screen,
Speaker 1: and my parents, we'll also attest to uh me being grounded.
Speaker 1: So if you hold up a donut magnet to the
Speaker 1: television screen, Chris will be round it. Yes, exactly. Uh no,
Speaker 1: don't do it, Just don't do it, please. I just
Speaker 1: you know, I'm thirty nine years old and just got free.
Speaker 1: Um and that happened I was in junior high school. Wow.
Speaker 1: Uh No. But honestly, if you use a powerful magnet
Speaker 1: and put it right up to the hard drive that
Speaker 1: you have removed from your machine, it's going to do
Speaker 1: a lot to uh realign the magnetic field and structure
Speaker 1: of the information on those media's. Yeah. We actually talked
Speaker 1: about that in the sun Spot podcast about how if
Speaker 1: you if you do have a really powerful magnet and
Speaker 1: you put it near a less powerful magnet, the less
Speaker 1: powerful magnets magnetic field will realign to the more powerful
Speaker 1: magnetic magnets magnetic field. So yeah, it's just one of
Speaker 1: those neat things about magnets and uh yeah, so those
Speaker 1: are not good for anything that uses magnetism as its
Speaker 1: storage method, that is correct. So so yeah, that's another
Speaker 1: good point, um, both in if you want to try
Speaker 1: and get rid of data or if you want to
Speaker 1: prevent that from happening. Uh yeah, it depends on whether
Speaker 1: or not you know you have bagnots nearby and handy. Um.
Speaker 1: So yeah, that kind of wraps up the discussion about
Speaker 1: permanently deleting files off your computer. Oh I have one
Speaker 1: other thing I should mention. Oh and I do too. Okay,
Speaker 1: do you want to go first or shall I? UM?
Speaker 1: I was just gonna say, if you are going to
Speaker 1: go so far as to take a sledgehammer to your
Speaker 1: hard drive or a power drill or something else to it,
Speaker 1: please take safety safety precautions because you do not want
Speaker 1: to lodge a piece of hard drive in your eye
Speaker 1: um or or worse. I mean, you could seriously get
Speaker 1: hurt because once that thing busts open, it's there's gonna
Speaker 1: be lots of little shards of hard drive everywhere and
Speaker 1: you don't want to get hurt. So please there, please
Speaker 1: take safety precautions and where eye protection if you're going
Speaker 1: to do something like that, right, and and remember that
Speaker 1: there are toxic elements within computers as well, definitely, so
Speaker 1: lead and mercury and all sorts of other stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you need time you're you're messing around with stuff
Speaker 1: like that. We treated it pretty lightly, but yes, there
Speaker 1: are there are actual possible harmful things that could happen,
Speaker 1: So keep that in mind whenever you're doing anything with computers.
Speaker 1: But the thing I wanted to mention was that we've
Speaker 1: really focused on computers in this podcast, but this really
Speaker 1: holds true for other devices as well, because we have
Speaker 1: more and more devices now that have these kind of
Speaker 1: elements to them, like smartphones. Um, and so for smartphones,
Speaker 1: you'll have to look for specific kinds of applications or
Speaker 1: you'll have to find a way of getting into the
Speaker 1: roots system of the smartphone in order to really wipe
Speaker 1: it clean. But that is a big thing. I mean,
Speaker 1: you don't you don't want to if you're getting rid
Speaker 1: of your phone, you want to wipe that phone before
Speaker 1: you donated or get rid of it. Because it's going
Speaker 1: to have all those contacts and things like that, especially
Speaker 1: if it's safe to the phone and not to say
Speaker 1: a simcard, And the same holds true for things like
Speaker 1: game consoles. The reason I bring that up is I
Speaker 1: got an Xbox three sixty and my my wife purchased
Speaker 1: it for me as a present, and she she bought
Speaker 1: a refurbished one, which is fine. I had no problem
Speaker 1: with that. The thing I did notice was that the
Speaker 1: previous owner had neglected to wipe his information off the
Speaker 1: Xbox three sixty, so his Xbox Live account information was
Speaker 1: still active. Now, if I were a dishonest, terrible person,
Speaker 1: I might try to use that information to log onto
Speaker 1: Xbox Live without paying for it to see if perhaps
Speaker 1: it was still an active account, and that would have
Speaker 1: been really dishonest and I'd be stealing essentially. Now I'm
Speaker 1: an honest person, so I went through the trouble of
Speaker 1: actually wiping that off myself. But even then I just
Speaker 1: did the simple delete because you know, I wasn't gonna
Speaker 1: I didn't worry about overwriting it. It's not my information,
Speaker 1: so I just deleted it the normal way. If you
Speaker 1: want to delete something permanently off Xbox three sixty. That's
Speaker 1: another podcast. So anyway, just keep that stuff in mind.
Speaker 1: Remember that when you hit that delete key, it does
Speaker 1: not necessarily go away forever. So if you're trying to
Speaker 1: really delete something, take the proper ups. Be careful because
Speaker 1: you don't want to delete everything necessarily. Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: unless you really do, which case have at it. But
Speaker 1: otherwise otherwise, be careful because you don't want to end
Speaker 1: up making your computer into, you know, just a basic
Speaker 1: electronic calculator that you're gonna have to load everything back
Speaker 1: onto again. Uh and UH. If you have any questions
Speaker 1: or concerns, you've got any criticism, criticisms like the way
Speaker 1: I say criticism, or you have suggestions for other topics,
Speaker 1: you can write us. Our email address is tech stuff
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com and Chris and I
Speaker 1: will talk to you again really soon if you're a
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Speaker 1: find us on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash tech
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