# How can I erase floppy discs securely?



## sgould (Apr 14, 2006)

I no longer own a viable Mac with a 3 1/2 inch floppy drive.  

I'm having a clear out and need to throw out a load of old 800 and 1.44 floppies (possibly some 400 ones as well!).  What is the simplest and quickest way of erasing all data and making it unrecoverable at the same time?

Or is it best just to burn the lot?

I could probably borrow a PC with a floppy drive.


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## albloom (Apr 14, 2006)

Burning the lot has appeal. But it stinks.

Try an audiotape degausser from, say, Radio Shack.
I forget what it's called in the UK. Memory is the
second thing to go.


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## symphonix (Apr 14, 2006)

I always found a household woodchipper to be a fairly final way of destroying old floppy discs. Not many people can recover data from a disk that is in a hundred tiny pieces. I've done this once for a company I was working for, and the woodchipper made short work of turning two filing cabinets full of discs into three buckets of debris. Wear safety glasses, you don't want someone's WordPerfect documents in the back of your eye.

Oh, yeah, and don't burn them, the fumes are pretty awful and dangerous.


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## sgould (Apr 14, 2006)

I hadn't thought of the chipper - I've got one in the shed! No problem with safety gear - I use it at work - see avatar! 

If I burn them it will be in the incinerator at work.

Thanks all!


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## adambyte (Apr 14, 2006)

I'd go with a degausser ... or, just find a really strong magnet of your own and give it a few swipes.


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## easterhay (Apr 14, 2006)

I used to use this when I had a PC: http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file_description/0,fid,22963,00.asp
If you can borrow a Windoze machine it should do the job.
Nowhere near as much fun as the woodchipper though!


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## sinclair_tm (Apr 14, 2006)

if you have a woodchipper, use it.  but other than that, when my dad wanted to destroy disks, he'd bust it open, tear the metal piece out of the middle and then run the media in a paper shredder, or if no shredder, then just wad it up into a ball.  once its creased, theres no using it again.


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## sgould (Apr 15, 2006)

I have found an old laptop at work in a cupboard.  It has a floppy drive and seems to work.  It's running windows 98.

Would re-formatting in DOS format erase all the stuff on old Mac formatted discs?


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## Mikuro (Apr 15, 2006)

Yes, but it wouldn't be totally secure. A professional data recovery place could recover it, and it would probably even be recoverable with normal consumer software. I'm sure there are secure reformatters available, which would write over all the data with random bits a few times, but that would probably take way too long.

Physically destroying the discs seems like the most reasonable solution. If you're talking about a lot of discs, putting each one into a machine to erase the data would be a hassle. Fortunately, floppies are not very durable, so destroying them is easy. If I had a wood chipper, I know I couldn't resist dumping some floppies into it. Heck, I'd probably buy some new ones just for the purpose. 

In the past, when I've had to destroy floppies, I cracked open the plastic case, and cut up the actual floppy part inside with a pair of scissors. Fun for the whole family!


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## albloom (Apr 15, 2006)

Reformatting a floppy is unlike a "normal" HD reformat
which just wipes the directory. A floppy format does the
whole disk. And a PC format can replace the Mac data, 
but 144s have the same layout in both systems.


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