1. See if your disk has a file at least 500 or 600 words long. If so, make a copy. If not, type out a file that long. I’ll call this new file “B.”
2. “Write” File B’s contents under A’s name. “Overwrite” in other words.
3. Erase A.
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]]
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.