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I love reading lists of dumb things that people do with their computers and their data. Those lists are always good for a laugh and today I was reading a list of dumb things people have done with their memory storage devices and really enjoying it ... until some of those dumb things began to resonate with me.

Like the ant infestation of an external hard drive. If you live in a place where ants aren't a problem then I envy you. Here where I live it's like paradise ... except for those damn ants. Before I moved here I knew very little about ants but since moving here I've been taught so much about the various ant species that inhabit this small block of ground. I've learnt about their mating habits, their feeding habits and their migratory habits too.

I've discovered that you can have ants nesting in the seals of your refrigerator - although that hasn't happened to me ... yet. I've discovered that ants can nest in your walls; they can nest in the ceiling; they can search for food on office desks where no food has ever been consumed ... and they can use laptops as hatcheries for their eggs because laptops are warm places on cool nights.

Try sitting down to a quite night in front of the television and putting a laptop infested with ants on your knees ... I can assure you that it's an experience you would rather not experience.

I'm even on first name terms with our local pest exterminator because now I see him at least twice a year and shortly after Christmas we'll be building his website for him ... probably on that laptop that has been infested with ants ... now there's something poetic for you.

At least I didn't do what one dumb person did when they discovered that their external hard drive was infested with ants. This guy took the cover off and sprayed insect spray through the interior and it killed the little buggers ... but it also nearly killed his data too.

Then there's the guy with the squeaky hard drive. Now I have to say right from the outset that I've never done anything like this ... but I do know someone who has done something similar. The guy with the squeaky hard drive decided that he needed to fix it so he drilled a hole in it and poured some oil into it.

Of course that fixed the squeak but you can imagine how well the hard drive worked after that. The oil incident that I can relate to involved a friend who had a very noisy fan in his box. Rather than replace the fan he decided a few drops of oil in the bearing would help the fan to run more quietly ... and it did. But then he had to spend a lot of time cleaning away the oil that was sprayed all over the interior of the computer.

You know they say that cleanliness is next to Godliness but washing your USB sticks is probably taking things a little too far. It seems that lots of people don't realize that though and many USB sticks go through the washing machines on this planet every day.

The guy who runs the computer shop that we share office space with frequently washes his USB sticks. Fortunately for him they still seem to work quite well after they've been washed and spun dry but there are many others who do lose all their data. So just to ensure that Steve isn't one of those people I've got him a USB stick that's encased in rubber and is just about waterproof.

In case you didn't realize it data that you think you've either erased intentionally or accidentally is not necessarily lost. It's quite possible that it's still there and quite accessible if you happen to have the right tools. Many damaged disks and other data storage devices can be encouraged to give up their secrets so you need to be careful with the data you've had stored on hard drives that you're about to sell or junk.

Simply using the delete function in your operating system or overwriting the data with something else does not really prevent that data from being read long after you thought you deleted it. Just last week another computer technician came into the shop with a memory stick that she had stored some important data on. Unfortunately in the writing stage the data had become corrupted and she hoped that our friend would be able to recover some of it for her.

Using a fairly simple forensic program he not only recovered the corrupted data but was pulling up files that she thought she had deleted from the memory stick a year or more ago.

Now you don't do dumb things with your data do you? And when you want to erase your important data you do make sure that it really is erased and is completely gone from your data storage devices don't you?

I find that the best tool to erase data forever is a hammer and/or some sandpaper.