Article: The fine art of data destruction
Shawn
the information-management team at the College of Southern Maryland,
was asked recently to help dispose of what she now estimates were
about 1,200 old backup tapes and cassettes her IT organization had
been storing in a relatively well-fortified walk-in vault.
The issue of what to do with the old tapes came to a head when
renovation was scheduled for the building where the vault resided. "We
had already moved to another backup system. So, these old tapes didn't
work in our current system anyway. Now it was just old data we needed
to figure out how to dispose of properly," Jones says.
Her research led her to Data Killers, a media-destruction and computer-
recycling firm in Maryland that could shred tapes and hard drives
securely, and provide a certificate affirming their destruction. It
would even let you stay and watch the shredding process, if you
wanted. Then the media's "remains" would be delivered to a smelter for
melting and recycling its various metals.
With its 6,600-pound shredder, Data Killers is able to take just about
any storage medium, such as the college's tapes, and turn it into
particles the size of a thumbnail, owner Elizabeth Wilmot says.
Full story here:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=security&articleId=9016322&taxonomyId=17&intsrc=kc_feat
Shawn