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Well 1st off, I bought a new computer… and since then my roommates have had a field day with it. I have more programs, saved files, patches, and excess folders than you can shake a stick at :slap: on this damn thing. Best part, none of it’s mine and I have little to no idea what all this crap goes to. It just makes it a real pain in the ass to find my stuff through all the rubble.
Now here’s where it gets really great. I’ve come to realize I can’t find some of my stuff b-cuz it’s been deleted.
All my original J pics from his last show here…gone
All my original Hellacopters pics from their last show here…gone
My trip to California and back a year and a half ago…gone
All my pics from my trip to Vegas in October…goneOne person’s careless delete of a folder is another’s case of woe
Luckily the show pics are on a website, but they’re still not the originals…
Hope the other people I went on these trips with still have their copies of the discs.Bummer
Sorry, just stopped through and had to vent. Peace board.
shit thats bad, I hope they bought you lots of beer to say sorry
Keep smiling
and tell your roommates :slap:Sorry to hear about all of this, Kurt. Those pics are still on my site, aren’t they? (I haven’t touched them anyway.)
Did your new machine come with Windows 2000 or XP? If so, here’s a little trick (make sure you know your windows password) Hold down the windows keys (the one that pops up the start menu) and then press L… That’ll lock your machine so that only you can access it.
If it’s a new computer, can’t you do that backup thing, make it like it was when you HAD the shit you needed on it?
Quote:hold down the windows keys (the one that pops up the start menu) and then press L…Technically, I can make myself an administrator, and all of them users, but it severely limits what they use can use it for. If I give them the administrative option then we’re just back to square one. Right now I have the only computer in the house with web access so locking them off isn’t really an option. Nice try though
Quote:those pics are still on my site right?yeah, yours and mine, but they’re not the originals
Quote:I hope they bought you lots of beer to say sorryThat’d be nice
Quote:If it’s a new computer, can’t you do that backup thing, make it like it was when you HAD the shit you needed on it?This raises a very interesting question. Technically, when info is deleted, it isn’t really deleted, rigjy? That space is just dedicated to be reused when new info is encoded rather than being off limits, right? So technically, there’s a good chance it’s still somewhere on my hard drive, right??? Provided no new information hasn’t already been encoded over that data on my hard drive, right???
But, chances are, I’d have to be a real tech head (which I ain’t), or an FBI tech (which I ain’t) to regain this info correct???…or do I….hhhhhhhhmmmmmm……
ask johno i think he once explained to me how that back up thing on XP works, i think if you PM him he’ll get an email letting him no, and when i speak to him later i’ll tell him to come on and check the board.
They should at least be keeping you in liquor for the use of your pc…or would that be misuse
Good luck, sounds like you’ll need it
Personal Info Remains on Old Hard Drives
Thu Jan 16,11:52 AM ET Add Technology – AP to My Yahoo!By JUSTIN POPE, AP Business Writer
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – So, you think you cleaned all your personal files from that old computer you got rid of?
Two MIT graduate students suggest you think again.
Over two years, Simson Garfinkel and Abhi Shelat bought 158 used hard drives at secondhand computer stores and on eBay. Of the 129 drives that functioned, 69 still had recoverable files on them and 49 contained "significant personal information" — medical correspondence, love letters, pornography and 5,000 credit card numbers. One even had a year’s worth of transactions with account numbers from a cash machine in Illinois.
About 150,000 hard drives were "retired" last year, according to the research firm Gartner Dataquest. Many end up in the trash, but many also find their way back onto the market.
Over the years, stories have surfaced about personal information turning up on used hard drives, raising concerns about privacy and the danger of identity theft.
Last spring, Pennsylvania sold used computers that contained information about state employees. In 1997, a Nevada woman bought a used computer and discovered it contained prescription records on 2,000 customers of an Arizona pharmacy.
Garfinkel and Shelat, who reported their findings in an article to be published Friday in the journal IEEE Security & Privacy, said they believe they are the first to take a more comprehensive — though not exactly scientific — look at the problem.
On common operating systems such as Microsoft’s Windows, simply deleting a file, or even following that up by emptying the "trash" folder, does not necessarily make the information irretrievable. Those commands generally delete a file’s name from the directory. But the information itself can live on until it is overwritten by new files.
Even reformatting a drive, or preparing the hard drive all over again to store files, may not do it. Fifty-one of the 129 working drives in the MIT study had been reformatted, and 19 of them still contained recoverable data.
The hard-to-erase quality of hard drives is seen as a good thing by some. Many users like believing that, in a pinch, an expert could recover their deleted files. Law enforcement officers can examine a computer and lift incriminating e-mails or porno images from the hard drive.
The only sure way to erase a hard drive is to "squeeze" it: writing over the old information with new data — all zeros, for instance — at least once, but preferably several times. A one-line command will do that for Unix (news – web sites) users, and for others, inexpensive software from companies such as AccessData works well.
But few people go to the trouble. Many ordinary computer users toss their old drives into the closet, or take a sledgehammer to it.
As it turned out, most of the hard drives acquired by the MIT students came from businesses that apparently had a misplaced confidence in their ability to "sanitize" old drives.
Tom Aleman, who heads the analytic and forensic technology group at the accounting firm Deloitte & Touche, often encounters companies that get burned by failing to fully sanitize, say, the laptop of an employee who leaves the company for a job with a competitor.
"People will think they have deleted the file, they can’t find the file themselves and that the file is gone when, in fact, forensically you may be able to retrieve it," he said.
Garfinkel has learned his lesson. As an undergrad at MIT in the 1980s, he failed to sanitize his own hard drive before returning a computer to his father. His father was able to read his personal journal.
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