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Amazon will not tell me what happens to their hard drives (medium.com/datareallies)
4 points by DataRealLies on Sept 6, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments



That is one of the reasons why I encrypt every drive. Only boot partition has to be unencrypted, the rest has to be encrypted.

It is a part of "data is toxic" approach.

I'm not willing to spend time to trace what data is stored where - db, rabbitmq/mnesia, kafka, whatelse. Even if i did how I am supposed to wipe it if those tools during operation probably remove old data in rm style instead of shred-ding. Some of my clients consider their internal network configuration to be sensitive, so even my /etc/hosts is toxic.

IMO you have to either encrypt everything or be prepared to physically destroy your hdds with drill.


100% agree, and encrypting is better than physically destroying, because your hardware might just get stolen (or confiscated), at which point it's a bit hard to physically destroy them.

For anyone worried about the overhead of encrypting for writes and decrypting for reads: barely noticeable for me (though I don't do very IO intensive things).


I expect they sell them along with other returned items by the pallet for very low prices, without doing any kind of wipe or QA check at all.




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