The second life of hard drives

    It all started with the fact that on one of the servers there was a need for an additional hard drive. It is worth noting that the data center in which it is located is western, namely the States, and far from the cheapest, but even one of the top ones. The procedure for ordering an additional disk is simple to impossibility - you click on the button, pay the bill, confirm your agreement to remove / stop the server.

    Rejoicing in the new hardware, the devil pulled me immediately to try to mount it (server running FreeBSD). And lo and behold ... an alien file system appeared to me!

    At first I was in shock, but then curiously prevailed. Rummaging around in the drive I got, I discovered that it used to belong to the server of a company that provides IP-telephony services. On it was a test version of billing as well as all archive copies. Having rummaged in archival copies, which also contained a dump of the working base, it was found: access to the control panel, financial information of the company and customers, address books of customers.

    Studying the site (or rather its absence) where all this miracle worked before, showed that either the company changed its name / brand or most likely closed and the server simply did not pay for the next term. And if they just ordered an upgrade of the hard drive or server? This would not affect the negligence of system administrators who simply removed the hard drive from one server and inserted it into another.

    What do you want to say? If you are changing, selling or simply upgrading a server, a regular PC, laptop or even a phone, do not forget to thoroughly clean the hard drive. Especially photos from the phone;) Remember that the next owner may suffer from curiosity, and sometimes with a sophisticated ability to recover deleted files or just a partition table after formatting.

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