To _really_ erase an entire disk? Well, don’t depend on your computer’s
“copy” program or “format” program. Instead, just sweep a magnet over
it—within a quarter inch or so.[57]
Footnote 57:
My thanks to J. Michael Nye, for calling my attention to the problems
of incomplete erasures. Ed Bigelow, of Adevco, a Pennsylvania company
selling networks to link computers in the same office, also was
helpful.
So much for the James Bond kind of data security. Now on to coffee
spilled on floppy disks.
Whether it’s coffee or Coke, unless you’re careful, you’re possibly
going to be your own biggest data-security threat. Just ask people like
Betty Cappucci, a quality-control manager with the Dennison Kybe
Corporation in Kopkinton, Massachusetts. “Most of the time,” she says of
returned disks, “it isn’t the disk—it’s spit or fingerprints. All you
have to do is look at offices with people eating their lunch near their
computers.”
“We see disks coming back with cigarette ashes and coffee stains,” said
Jack Fitzgerald, who at the time was a field engineer with another disk
maker.
And it isn’t just the very smallest computer users who abuse their
disks. “The big problem in computer facilities,” he says, “often is
cleanliness. I’ve been to a large investment firm in New York City and
seen apple cores on the floor, Big Mac containers near the disks. And
yet they were complaining of data-loss problems.
“This was a major investment firm with all sorts of ads on news programs
and football games about how carefully they protected your money,” says
Fitzgerald. “No investor lost money in this case because the firm at
least had backup disks. But the company itself lost thousands of dollars
of processing time—money they could have spent helping their investors
earn more.”
A programmer with a Florida accounting firm, however, didn’t even have a
backup when his disk crashed on a large computer.
“He was actually crying on the phone,” Fitzgerald recalls. “He had lost
two disks. And he was willing to pay $20,000 to get data off them. His
job was on the line.
“I’ve had disk crashes myself,” Fitzgerald says, discussing his
off-hours work on his micro. “I was developing a small game similar to
Space Invaders. I lost power on my computer and about three hours of
work. I ignored one of my basic rules, which is to back up about every
20 lines—make a copy on a second disk.” Captain Zap’s rule is, “Every
fifteen minutes, save on both disks.” That’s extreme. Like all forms of
security, apply this in relation to the trouble it would take to recover
a loss.
Even Paul Lutus, famous in the industry for his work developing Apple
software, has a scary crash story.[58]
Footnote 58:
The Lutus story is from _Popular Computing_.
He’d toiled to develop a new program, of which he took two copies to the
company. An electronic glitch cost him one of the copies. The sun melted
the other. It seems that Steve Jobs, an Apple cofounder, had put the
disk under the windshield of his car. “I ended up very carefully prying
apart the case of Jobs’s copy and switching the floppy disk inside to
another case so we could recover the programs,” Lutus says. “I haven’t
always been so lucky.... For me the biggest drawback to personal
computing is the quality of the mass storage. I dislike floppy disks
intensely.”
Here’s how you can help your floppies and data survive threats more
immediate—sloppiness and stupidity: