So I learned that if a MicroSD card gets snapped in half, its unrecoverable.

Okay, so suppose you were in war, and enemy soldiers were about to raid you. You just snap the cards in half and the data is un-recoverable, right?

  • ERROR: Earth.exe has crashedOPEnglish
    26•16 days ago

    most of the data could still be read off with an electro microscop

    So what you’re saying is that, its recoverable, just not by the average data recovery company.

    • asudox
      13•15 days ago

      Your best bet would be to shred the data multiple times (for example with the shred command) and then break the card physically. But shredding takes time so I guess that’s not very applicable to your case.

      If you have a lighter, you also can try to melt the SD card’s insides. That should be impossible to recover.

      In any case, you should keep it encrypted all the time and only decrypt it on the fly. For example with LUKS2.

      • Great Blue
        6•15 days ago

        Shredding might not work the way you expect on a SD card.

        The memory cells in a SD Card can only handle a limited amount of write operations. A SD card typically has more cells than needed, so the controller can switch through different cells to improve the overall lifetime of the card. Which means you can’t be sure which cells gets rewritten when shredding, so the data you want to be gone, could still be readable.

        If you want to secure your data, use strong encryption. Because what you gonna do, if you can’t destroy or get rid of the SD card?

        • @[email protected]
          0•13 days ago

          So I probably shouldn’t store my MacOS time machine backups on a 250GB microSD card? (It was the only practical thing I had when I started it and I never got around to changing it)

          • Great Blue
            1•12 days ago

            I don’t know how MacOS time machine works exactly, but if it constantly writes on the SD card you should consider changing to an external SSD or HDD. The best backup isn’t helpful if your backup medium dies.