Photocopier security

[neilr]

A while ago I heard about a CBS story regarding copy machines, and how they frequently have a hard drive that stores every document processed, and how this drive was frequently not scrubbed when a leased machine was returned and then sent back out into the field, which meant that the data could easily be recovered by whoever received the copier

Comments

[garote]

I have not used a photocopier in five years. Good riddance.

[conflictdswitch]

How big is this hard drive? At the tutoring place I used to work at, we'd easily go through half a ream of paper a day, usually on single copies. I'm pretty sure that thing is full by now.

[garote]

Let's say it's relatively old tech, and only contains a 180GB hard drive.
Let's say the average JPG-compressed scan is encoded with a quality that makes an average file size of 512k. That's over-the-top in terms of the algorithm chosen and the file size.
Taking formatted capacity and filesystem overhead into account, there's room on that drive for roughly 350,000 images.
That means a hundred images every day for almost ten years.