Nice Article
Thanks Chad, I appreciated the article. Most points are probably fairly obvious, but can easily get lost in the busy-ness of daily work life. I particularly like the ideas of checklists, signing off and having separate areas for equipment in need of decomissioning.
The only point I didn't agree with is #3. I don't know why people have this idea the physically destroying hard disks is more effective than overwriting the data. There have been examples in the past where data has been recovered from drives that were bashed with a hammer or otherwise physically beaten. I guess witnessing the destruction with our own eyes gives us a (misplaced) confidence that the data is unrecoverable. The only proper way to be rid of data is to overwrite it lots of times. I believe there are no known cases of data being recovered when overwritten (I think it was ) three times. The paranoid can of course do it more often.
