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From: dg@wrs.UUCP (David Goodenough)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Do You Protect Portables/Disks in Air Travel?
Message-ID: <275@wrs.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 24-Jul-87 17:37:02 EDT
Article-I.D.: wrs.275
Posted: Fri Jul 24 17:37:02 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 26-Jul-87 01:24:57 EDT
References: <862@dasys1.UUCP>
Reply-To: dg@wrs.UUCP (David Goodenough)
Organization: Wind River Systems, Emeryville, CA
Lines: 26

In article <862@dasys1.UUCP> axelson@dasys1.UUCP (Kevin Axelson) writes:
>Can disk data be damaged by magnetic fields encountered during commercial air
>travel (e.g. from screening devices or elsewhere)?
>
>If so, what is the best tactic for reducing the risk?  Does anyone take extra-
>ordinary measures with their hard-disk equipped laptops?

From first hand experience I will say that I once was carting a 2400 foot
reel of mag tape (ALMOST FULL) across the country, and I let airport
security zap it with their X-ray machine. In my innocence I knew that X-rays
alone were not too harmful, but I forgot the medium sized magnetic fields
produced by most x-ray machines. I lost about two years worth of source
in one go :-(. Since then I've never let airport security near any
magnetically encoded media - floppys / hard disk systems / mag tape
audio tapes / video tapes or anything. What I do is to get them to
examine whatever it is by hand - I'm not letting them x-ray it, and I'm
not about to walk through the magnetic gun detctor with it, so that only
leaves the visual inspection option. After four / five years of this I've
never had an objection (quite a lot of odd looks - but no objections)
--
		dg@wrs.UUCP - David Goodenough

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