Originally Posted by
theisgroup
this is not very likely. just sit a motor on top of a floppy for even a day and see if the floppy still works. I guarantee you that it will have no effect. we use a high power electromagnet that spins to even clear backup tapes. to clear a hard drive we have to run this thing for like almost 1 hour.
I am an IT Engineer who prime function is Engineering Open system UNIX/Sybase/Oracle/Windows/and anything else backups to disk and tape. We backup about 80 terabytes a night and then make a duplicate copy of 25 TBs. What kind of tapes are you using? LTO? STK? IBM? We run 1 pass to write 1s and 0s to overwrite the data on the tape...
A laptop/home computer disk drives are not the same as business ones. They do not have the shielding to protect the spinning disks which are magneticily written to. I seen a contractor put a magnet on top of a IBM blade ( he used it to pick up metal shaving from install a CRAC unit in our data center ) and completely wipe out 250 Gigs of data in a nano second. We had to do a bare-metal-restore to a new server since that was was toast....