[icecube123]

Thats over 20 years old. Its not worth mentioning in this discussion.

He only sells one product, Spin-Rite which actually works pretty well for its purpose, tho it’s becoming less important as we move more towards SSD.

It sounds like you’re spreading misinformation just for the hell of it.

[svc0]

I've always been curious why people so fervently dislike Gibson. I think the most genuine criticism is that Spin-Rite is not a backup solution and people may rely on it as such. Ideally, no one should need it since all data should be replicated and backed up. Any drive can fail at any time for any reason and it may be totally unrecoverable.

[Side Note: He also once claimed in a "testimonial" that a special ops team recovered data off of a hard drive during a mission in which they hit a terrorist with a computer.]

That being said, he produces a free security podcast which is quite good. He knows his stuff.

[pdonis]

> Any drive can fail at any time for any reason and it may be totally unrecoverable.

While in principle this is true, I have been using hard drives for more than 30 years now in PCs and I have never had one fail. I still back things up to separate drives since there's always a first time, but I've never used SpinRite or any other extra "protection" over and above what my OS provided.

[svc0]

There are stats on failure rates and bathtub curves. Consumer hard drives these days have an AFT of ~1.41%. Never used SpinRite and I don't know if there is evidence for it but I suggest you backup your data.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q3-...

[icecube123]

The podcast is great. Provides great information and is more than happy to provide corrections when some calls him on it. Takes a very scientific approach to issues.

[coleca]

I agree. Not sure why all the hate. I’ve used SpinRite to recover some bad drives of mine and friends/family over the years and it’s worked quite well. Had one Windows box that was failing to boot before the login screen, ran SpinRite and it found / fixed some issues. Rebooted and the machine was fine. At least fine enough to copy everything to a new drive and ditch the old one. Haven’t tried it on an SSD though.

[icecube123]

Hes had a few testimonials that say its helped SSDs but only run it at level 2, (read only), as level 4 (read write) will wear a disk prematurely.

[CyberDildonics]

You only have one other comment and it was 16 months ago, this must have really touched a nerve.

[heleninboodler]

You can take or leave the relevance of this "old" information, but there are dozens of pages on his current website that speak for themselves.

Most of it is just self-aggrandizing technobabble trying to appear authoritative and "educate" people on security issues with hilariously dumb content like the page that recommends checking Facebook's cert hash on his site before trusting it. His number one goal appears to be to convince people he is an "influential voice" in the security community (he uses that phrase to describe himself repeatedly). I just find it sad when I encounter people who buy it. Luckily, it mostly seems to appeal to a certain kind of misinformed enthusiast that I rarely encounter these days.

Note that this isn't to say all his info is bad. I particularly like stuff like his explanation of how NAT works. That's great content. If it wasn't mixed in with the chicken little snake oil stuff, I'd actually refer people to it.