Funny thing..last night on NUMB3RS, someone had a student repair her CD player
and he ended up frying a CD. This afternoon I found what looked like a
partially melted CD on my lawn.
Hmmmm!
dl
Mal Rockwell wrote:
> Tin snips work well for cutting them up.
> But something more permanent, like burning them, is probably a major
> environmental hazard. I know I wouldn't want to be breathing anywhere
> around them while they're on fire!
> It'd be nice if a random signal could be burned over existing data, thus
> making it unreadable, but I don't think that can be done easily.
> Still, if you just want to throw them away where do you throw them?
> Now to read other contributors answers...
> Mal
>
> *******
>
> Trey Bunn wrote:
>
>> This may be an odd question considering that it's pretty much the
>> opposite of what most of us normally do, but I was wondering if anyone
>> had any tips on how to destroy a CD-R. Say, for example, you had a CD
>> (data or audio) with sensitive material on it that you didn't want to
>> just throw in the trash and hope that no one ever found it and played
>> it. Yes, I know that ending up in a landfill wouldn't do it any good,
>> but that wouldn't necessarily make it unplayable. I'm reminded of a
>> huge lot of cassettes that my brother and I found in a dump around
>> 1980 that we took home to record over, and we found that they were
>> recordings of some kind of courtroom cases, probably stuff we never
>> should have heard. We were too young to be interested in them and
>> just recorded over them (I still have some of those same tapes, and
>> yes, they still play), but still, whoever just chucked them in the
>> trash was being rather sloppy, I'd think.
>>
>> So anyway, back to the CD problem. Last night I tried to break one in
>> half, thinking that since it was plastic, it would snap in two if bent
>> hard enough, but no. The thing was nearly impossible to break. I
>> tried using a cabinet door for leverage, but that still didn't bend it
>> enough to break. I did manage to warp the surface and the inner gold
>> layer enough that its data probably wouldn't be recoverable, but the
>> more trouble it gave me, the more I began to wonder if any of you guys
>> out there had a specific procedure in place for getting rid of CDs
>> other than just chucking them. I also tried cutting it in half with
>> some needle-nose pliers and taking a lighter to the writeable surface,
>> and while this did some damage, it still wasn't what I'd consider the
>> data equivalent of using a paper shredder. Certainly not efficient or
>> easy, either.
>>
>> Any thoughts? And no, before anyone thinks I have a CD full of super
>> secret scary government files or something, don't worry. It was just
>> a back-up of personal correspondence and journal entries that I didn't
>> need anymore (I made a more updated back-up). I know this isn't
>> specifically a recorded sound-related question, but it could be, you
>> know, if one were to have a recording on CD-R like the ones I
>> described above.
>>
>
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