Missing or stolen USB flash drives have had a great deal of attention over the past two years.  But bigger drives can go astray too, and when they do, it can mean a truly massive data loss.

It was announced yesterday that a hard drive has been reported missing from the US National Archives, containing over 1 terabyte of sensitive data from the time of President Clinton’s administration.  Data includes the personal information of White House staff and visitors, logs of events, social gatherings, political records and more.

The drive was apparently stored in an unsecured work area, where National Archives employees were digitising information from the Clinton administration.  It’s estimated that over 100 staff had access to the area during the time period when the loss happened.  The FBI is now conducting a criminal investigation.

Mandatory hardware encryption – like that featured on our Cruzer Enterprise range of secure USB flash drives would have nullified the threat of such a loss.  As the old saying goes, the bigger they are, they harder they fall.  That applies to drive storage, too.