Panic! How it Works and What To Do About It: “People get a message stating, ‘There are a lot of interesting things on this disk, but I seem to have misplaced my glasses, so I can’t read it right now. Would you like me to utterly destroy all your work for the last year?’ Oh, I’m sorry. That’s not actually what it says. It says, ‘Disk damaged. Initialize?’ Too bad people don’t have a clue what ‘initialize’ means. In a single click, they greatly reduce or eliminate the possibility of recovering their information through a wide variety of available software and hardware options. Anyone writing messages like the above needs to be initialized.”

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