MetComm.Net, LLC :: Information technology is there for you!

By: Eric Durrand

We all know at least one of those people who refuse to ever throw anything away. They live surrounded by boxes. Old papers, old clothes, memorabilia from high school, and broken gadgets are all stored somewhere in their apartment, leaving very little room for actual living. Their place is always cramped, but they can always locate that first high school diploma, or that first love poem. Another type of person we all know is the throwaway fanatic: she lives in a clean, organized space – with nothing but the bare necessities that serve an active purpose in her daily life. Occasionally, however, she is overcome with nostalgia for an object, a book, or a photograph long gone. The same things she ruthlessly discarded as unimportant, not useful, and cumbersome – she sometimes discovers had some value after all.

 Humanity, it seems, has always been divided into those who keep everything, and those who throw away everything they can. The two mindsets play an important role in the virtual world of computers too, with data and storage management experts arguing about what should be saved and what deleted, what should be backed up – and what discarded.

While legal departments in many companies encourage routine deletion of old materials to avoid furnishing potential litigations, it is illegal to delete anything potentially useful when litigation is reasonably foreseeable. Also – various documents can actually help a company’s legal case, making it harder to decide whether or not to embrace a policy of deletion. The same is true of old engineering projects, old client information, and old e-mail communication. These files take up a lot of storage space, make it harder to find actual relevant information, and are hardly ever opened.

So what to do with all this old information? One popular solution is – to move it around. Many organizations have found it useful to create several “storage tiers”, ranging in accessibility, security, cost of media, etc. They gradually migrate old information to cheaper and less accessible storage solutions. In a small office, for instance, the information is migrated from a storage server to an external drive, and from the external drive to backup tapes. Or it can be moved from a hard drive to a CD-R, etc.

 After all, storage space prices continue to drop: The price per 1 megabyte dropped from $9 in 1990, to a little less than 1 cent in 2000, to a ratio of 8.7 megabytes for a single cent in 2004. Indeed, a whole Gigabyte of storage today costs much less than a megabyte (1/1000^th of a Gigabyte) cost only 16 years ago. While prices continue to drop – why delete anything?

 The answer is: deleting, or at least moving files away, is still financially wise. It saves space on the fastest, most expensive machines, it shortens searching time, and removes the clutter of irrelevant information that serves no purpose.

 Before deleting a file or e-mail message completely, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Would this be needed in the foreseeable future?

2. If not, is there a chance that it would ever be needed?

3. If so, what might it be needed for? Who in the company might need it?

 These questions will help you determine whether to keep a file, move it to a designated storage device, send it to another person in the organization, or truly delete it.

 Another challenge of data deletion is handling information that is useless to the company, but could prove damaging if falling into the wrong hands. Simply deleting a file does not make it truly disappear forever: experts can recover a file even after a deletion and several rewrites (meaning that you deleted the file, put something new in its place, but the electromagnetic “fingerprint” of the old file is still there, allowing expert hackers to recreate it).

 Simon Garfinkel, a privacy expert and MIT grad student, did an experiment in 2003: He bought 158 old hard drives on eBay, to see how much data was recoverable. Their findings: More than 5,000 credit card numbers, financial and medical records, personal e-mail and pornography were easily obtainable on the drives. The solution? When getting rid of an old hard drive, or an old storage device – sanitize it using special “erasure” tools. Morgud’s Erasure Suite, O&O SafeErase V2, and Blancco Data Cleaner+, are a few such tools. In cases of truly vital classified information – services like EMC’s Certified Data Erasure will provide you with even greater peace of mind.

 Data deletion, like many aspects of successful computing, requires planning. To avoid overcrowding on the one hand and information loss on the other, your organization needs to define what to delete, when, and how. Spending some time on defining a clear procedure will assist you in achieving an organized, efficient, and secure information storage system.