Look at these small polished rocks. How much more innocent can something look? Yet they almost cost me $800,000 worth of data.
These things are magnetic, and when you throw them in the air close to each other, they will click together with a brrrrrrrrrr sounds, because they touch many times before they settle down. Just a small, silly toy.
Except the thing is, those things are very strongly magnetic. Therein lies a tale.
I run a web business for which I have data on my computer worth over $800,000. So of course I make an off-site back-up. I have a large external hard disk, which is stored at a friend's house. Today when I got the disk home to back up, these two thing were stuck to it. And when I plugged it in, there were no data on it. None, zip, nada, diddley-squat. The disk was named "volume" instead of what I had named it. When I checked the disk with DiskWarrior, the graph for the disk was one smooth gradient. Not one kilobyte of data on it to resque.
I don't know how the formatting data survived, I thought they were just data on the disk like the rest of it. But no matter, there's no doubt that these magnets had erased the disk. If I had actually needed the backup today, I'd have been frigged. Fortunately my data did not depend on this disk alone.
I called my friend, and he told me that it seems his little daughter must have placed the things on my disk. And before that, they had ruined two credit cards, a photographic light-meter, and a friend's CRT Television set. When his daughter placed them on the screen of the TV, they pulled in the rays to one spot, and burned out the screen!
I don't know how they stayed in the hands of the little girl after that, but I know that I'm not letting them near any of my electronics.
David Pogue once tested the story about not letting magnets near your disks. He found out that it is exaggerated, he did not succeed in erasing a single disk, no matter how hard he tried. It seems like he just did not have strong enough magnets!
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Update: here is a warning from a company which sells the "toy". The things can be harmful in all kinds of ways.
I got this email from them:
Thank you for your feedback.
It is the first time I hear that the chirping magnets have done some damage, as they are a lot weaker than all the other supermagnets we sell.
This is what we do in terms of warnings:
1) There is quite an extensive warning on our website concerning magnets in general.
2) There is a link to this warning-page from the footer of *every single* page from our website: It says: "Please read the important information regarding the handling of neodymium magnets!" and it links to the warning-page in 1)
3) Before a customer can complete the order with us he has to actively check the following check-box: "[ ] I have read and understand the important information regarding the handling of neodymium magnets.". In this sentence "important information" is again a link to 1). If you don't check that check-box you can't complete the order.
4) With each parcel we include the warnings *AGAIN* printed on *bright yellow paper*. The content of this leaflet can be seen here.
5) With each parcel comes a delivery sheet and/or an invoice. On this short letter we say in the third sentence: "Please note the enclosed leaflet with important information regarding the proper use of your new neodymium magnets."
I think we went to great length to ensure that each customer is reasonably informed. Please tell me, what we could do additionally to warn our customers? At some point the customer is in charge and has to take some responsibility too, I think.
BTW: We do not manufacture these magnets, we just sell them via our website. There are several hundred shops where you can buy these magnets and countless street-vendors as well.
Please feel free to publish above information on your blog - maybe some of your readers can suggest how we can improve our shop in this regard?
Kind regards
Matthias Ackermann
www.supermagnete.de
16 comments:
Wow! Strong those little guys are!
I certainly hope that you have several, ROTATING backups of your primary database. Rotating, because if your primary DB gets messed up, you don't notice it until later, and you backup your messed up DB, you will not have a viable DB at all.
In the old days of mag tapes, we rotated at least 3 different physical media for backups - grandfather, father, and son. If son was trouble free, then everybody graduated and grandfather became reincarnated into the next son.
I'm willing to store one of your DOMAI backups here, BTW...
I have a backup disk in the machine, one in a firesafe, and one off-site.
Holy Shit!
But computers are not the only one being harmed by these new strong magnets -
http://tinyurl.com/2lcexd
My kids use to play with them all the time until I read the above article now it's just the toy ones.
Glad you were able to recover.
Jerry
Thanks.
Linked.
"now it's just the toy ones." ... What?
Toy magnets, like refrig magnets, are very weak, nice to play with no real power like the new class of super magnets.
A link I'm sure you'll find interesting
http://www.itbusinessedge.com/item/?ci=17451
And more about them as powerful "toys".
http://www.engconcepts.net/
http://www.supermagnete.de/eng/index.php?switch_lang=1
Jerry
Ah, the magical feeling of playing with magnetism when we were children, sticking them everywhere! I have a pair just like this one today.
Left my little nephew play with them under supervision for a few minutes. Supervision wasn't enough, he wasn't responsible enough. Even though told to only throw them over the carpet, he went and did it outside of it, the magnets fell on the tiling floor, and now one of them is snapped in two. A broken toy magnet is the least problematic that could have happened, but we've learned. He's never been allowed to touch them again. Only toy magnets allowed in our house too after that.
The beam deviation phenomenon is something I wouldn't have anticipated, but absolutely understandable. A cathodic tube beam is made of free electrons, electrically charged particles set in motion. A magnetic field deviates those. (And an electrical field accelerates them, Electricity 101.) In fact, the scanning of the screen by the beam is done precisely with a pair of constantly changing magnetic fields created by coils inside the boob tube.
Regarding the medical article, something puzzles me: sure, metal detectors might not work properly with them, but a common compass moved over the patient's skin should point straight at these "foreign bodies". Even simpler, sprinkling some iron dust and watching where it gathers. Dirt cheap, and takes mere seconds!!!
Once we yelled at my poor mom after she took the initiative of putting a magnetic religious icon on the PC's casing. Poor Mom! Luckily, a weak magnet, and removed seconds afterwards, did no damage. But blessed or not, a magnet icon to "protect" your PC from viruses is like spraying holy water on your electrical appliances for good luck.
I see another risk about these strong magnets: easy theft.
Those safety devices they place on clothes and which the cashier removes when you buy something, they use magnetism as a principle. Pop one of those babies in your pocket, and you could probably commit some dishonest acts in a supermarket with some know-how.
Similarly, the RFI stickers that are meant to make a portal beep if you try to sneak one without paying, they're deactivated over some pad with no immediate physical contact, through the packaging. Probably also a simple strong magnet.
The irony is, you might even find the tool for such theft among the items on sale in the same store!
I once saw the dark humour gag in a movie: a bandit on the run needs weapons, so he enters an armory, candidly checks a gun, asks for some matching ammo... and then he loads the gun, threatens the merchant and leaves without paying, robbing the store while at it. Oh, the irony.
It's quite fortunate that you did NOT lose all your data. I have a principle about those matters: for fear that a storm might affect magnetic storage supports from a distance if lightning strikes close to my house, I use opical back-up. DVDs.
Whatever the number of discs you need for your whole archives, it's well worth the price for your safety and peace of mind.
Gee, these modern magnets are more hazardous than I thought:
"Important information regarding the handling of neodymium magnets"
I guess Pascal never had a pair of PC speakers, and placed them too near to his CRT. Some of the larger amp'd speakers would have big enough magnets, and the cheaper monitors so little frame, that warping would happen.
But to pull all the electrons to one point for long enough to permanently damage the phosphors? How many "pixels" did they lose?
As for RFID tags. The radio's at the store front emit enough RF energy, which the RFID tag converts to electricity, which it, the tag, in turn uses to send the its response.
At the desk, don't they just use so much energy that the tag blows a fuse, and so cannot transmit anymore.
I doubt that the magnet is to blame. Today the HDs are quite well shielded from magnetic data loss. However, it is possible that those magnets somehow provoked the corruption of the service track on the HD (which in case of Western Digital is particularly unrecoverable). Every tool would show total blank then although the data is still there. A friend of mine worked for WD operating the so called spin-stands where they were recovering such disks. No biggie, 100% success rate.. just a couple thousand bucks later ;)
DVDs would be good, except I'd need like seventy of them! Very unwieldy.
Wwo! That sounds quite cool! A cool way to erase data!
My PC speakers are, how should I say, anaemic. Very old stuff.
While my monitor is rather "modern". :-)
Anyway, I know better than to play with magnets around electronics.
Dibutil Ftalat has a point. My brother once took apart a "dead" hard drive, and recovered from it a pair of those super-magnets. If there are magnets in the device, it means it should be designed with good disc shielding.
Eolake, 70 DVDs is less than my videogame collection (okay, so I've been collecting for a decade!), and would hold in an average-sized of those "disc wallets". Unwieldy for transferring your whole site, sure. But definitely reassuring toward magnetic fields. If "a couple thousand dollars" can't salvage your $800,000 backup, you'll be happy to have your cumbersome stack of DVDs.
Hmm, I've heard of lightning disabling a computer, but not of it erase a hard disk.
70 DVDs? Is that it?
That's going to seem like pigeon feed in a few years.
Every couple years we need to reevaluate our backup storage, and upgrade to a new hard drive. Because HD's go bad on average after 3.5 years... not to mention, they get full and the next generation has more space.
I don't believe in owning anything magnetic other than magnetic poetry. Too risky for photo and data hounds!
Eolake, I've been thinking...
If indeed data on a hard drive such as your malfunctioning one is still physically present, and could even be salvaged by some costly techniques, then it's likely that you can reuse your drive simply by formating it and re-recording the whole backup. It would be interesting, as a test, to know what really happened there.
There IS something Mr Ackermann could and should do to improve his company's warnings efficiency: grab every single one of their clients, and run then through a practical university course on magnet handling, followed by an assessment of their responsibility level and live tests. Oh, and hire a monitor for every user to keep an eye on them every minute.
Jesting, of course. There comes a time when product users must be adults. Do we really need a big, brightly colored warning sign on firearms reading: "WARNING - may cause body injury and eventual death, do not use against living beings"? They do it for TOY guns, after all.
Saaaay... maybe there's money to be made suing the NRA for insufficient customer information. Now all I need is the best bickering lawyer that money can buy. If one can sue fast foods or tobacco manufacturers, firearms should definitely be, dare I say, "fair game"!
Everything is possible, in the USA. By God, I love this glorious country, land of the free and place of opportunities. For the slick.
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Lightning is a high-intensity, high-voltage and very brief electrical discharge. All the required elements to create a powerful magnetic impulse. Any unshielded magnetic-based data support could potentially be wiped out. It's the principle of EMP weapons. (Electro-Magnetic Pulse. Also massively follows a nuclear explosion.)
Once, lightning struck on the iron banister of our balcony. It fried our TV's aerial amplificator, without having hit it. And startled the bejeebers out of us, as a bonus.
"it's likely that you can reuse your drive simply by formating it and re-recording the whole backup."
Sure, that's what I did.
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