this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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Maybe this is not the precise purview of this sub, but is there a way, in software, to cause a headcrash on an array of HDDs if you needed to destroy a hoard imminently? (alien.top)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Obligatory "asking for a friend". But no, like, if enemies of your state were possibly going to overrun a data center you rent a spot at but you still have some time, what's the quickest way to, remotely, absolutely ruin any of the data on the disks? I can remember seeing old IBM "Death"Stars with the magnetic medium stripped clean. Don't necessarily need that blatant a result, but say you didn't have enough time to know if a basic dd /dev/{zero,random,urandom} /dev/mraid0 could run long enough to overwrite everything even just once, let alone a few times.

Alternatively, is there a file system which is purpose built for this sort of thing, where you send the array some sort of panic code – and I'm not considering drive encryption with a hardware or software key, whereas even if they were in place they are external to the disks themselves and thus at risk from external factors, rather than there being some command I can send to, well, if not crash the heads, then otherwise completely unravel the data structure in an irretrievable way with just one or two commands?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Potentially relevant https://xkcd.com/538/.

In UK, and I expect other parts of the world, it is illegal to refuse to hand over encryption keys when compelled to do so by a court and the result is a jail sentence.

https://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/Regulation_of_Investigatory_Powers_Act_2000/Part_III#:~:text=Part%203%20of%20the%20Regulation,up%20to%20two%20years'%20imprisonment.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

So what happens if the suspect just goes "uhm I forgot". There's not really a way to prove if he forgot, or is refusing to tell.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

No password to gain if you stored it on paper. Get creative for your poor man's switch. If you are already recycling paper without a care for longevity, the acid will quickly plump the indentation from your writing pressure and diplace ink and "graphite." Great for the enviornment and ridding you of your pharmacy papers. Not so great for your sanity because it becomes a hobby.