The Copier May Eat Your Information

Watch out those so-called copy mahines or copiers! It is true...According to a survey held by SHARP in 2008 that "60% of Americans don’t know that copiers store images on hard drives"

Nearly every digital copier no matter what brands (Xerox, Canon, TOSHIBA, HP) built after 2002 contains a hard drive. Like one of your personal computers, it stores image of every documents, scan, copy or email by the machine. The initial design aims to speed up the copy and print processes. When each page of the original work passes over the copy surface, the photocopier scans a digital image of the work using a so-called digital scanner. Depending on the quality of the copier machines, the digital scan may take from about one second to almost half a minute. Although some very high-end copiers can copy one or more pages a second, most copiers process about one page every five to ten seconds. And those high-end copy machines are most likely to attach hard drives. Once the digital image is scanned, it may be manipulated to comply with controls set by the user. After the image is scanned in to memory and manipulated to the user’s preference, it is ready to be printed. But keep in mind, after you finish the copy or print work, the information you dealt with is still kept on the copier hard drive by means of images. This is why the copy machines may eat your private information even without your permission.
It reported that SHARP would charge you additional 500$ if you wanted to erase the stored image information on the hard drive of each of its copy machines. Leave out the price you may have to pay, I am wondering how the stuff working on copy machine industry erase those highly private information, by talking the drive out and connect to a computer then delete the private information directly or format the whole drive? Will delete or format erase the information on the hard drive permanently? I doubt that. If you have some knowledge of data recovery, you should know deleted or formatted information can be recovered from hard drives with a data recovery tool, or more specific by a photo recovery tool as the scanned information is stored in form of images.

News from: http://recoverdata.blog.com/2011/01/20/how-copy-machines-eat-the-information/