Do you have occasional shredding needs that are too much for the shredder that you have in your office or at home? If so, you might like to know about Datasite’s residential shredding services This is an excellent service for Puget Sound small office and home office customers.

[Update Nov 2010: Sip & Ship offers a drop off shredding service. They charge $1 per pound of paper or $10 per bankers box. You can drop off paper at either their Ballard or Greenwood location. The shredding is done at their Greenwood location. I've been a long-time user of Sip & Ship's services which I discuss in this Tech Tip.]

[Update Jan 2011: I recently learned that most OfficeMax stores offer a drop off shredding service. A press release shows that OfficeMax teamed up with Shred-It to offer this service about a year ago. In my local OfficeMax store I was told that they charge $.59 per pound of paper. You can drop off paper and they'll store it in a secure storage bin. A truck visits their store weekly to pick up the contents of the storage box and hauls it to Shred-It's shredding facility. For small shredding jobs this is the best value I've found. For larger shredding jobs DataSite's drop-off residential shredding service is an even better value.]

Below are some excerpts from their web site that were current as of the early 2010.

DataSite’s Residential Shredding Service meets the needs of the self-employed as well as serving the occasional shredding needs of any resident of the King – Snohomish County area. We recommend shredding your unnecessary bank statements, invoices, utility bills and miscellaneous private information. Clients collect information in a container either provided by DataSite or one of their own choosing.

Our customers may either drop off the collected material at one of two DataSite facilities, or schedule an on-site shredding appointment.

How much does it cost?

For drop-off service there is a minimum charge of $30.00. This is for up to 7 standard letter legal size records boxes (about the size of a copier paper box) or the equivalent.  Additional boxes are charged at $4.00 per box with additional discounts applied for larger volumes.

Document Destruction Boxes DataSite’s new Document Destruction Boxes may be purchased 3 for $25.00.  This includes the shredding once the containers are full.

Once they’re filled simply drop them off at DataSite for shredding.

On-site shredding is available with a minimum service charge of $75.00.

Where are you located?

DataSite has two convenient drop-off locations

Seattle: 9401 Aurora Ave North

Bellevue: 12000 N.E. 8th, Lower Level

How does it work?

Simply bring your sensitive materials to a DataSite facility and come into the office.  A DataSite staff member will bring a mobile locking tote to your vehicle or for larger volumes a pallet.  We do all the heavy lifting.  These materials are staged for shredding later in the day.  You will be issued a Certificate of Destruction for your records.

Do I have to remove staples and paper clips?  Can you destroy computer media?

No – our state of the art shredding equipment handles staples and paper clips with ease.  Report covers, hard bound books and even x-rays are no problem.

For years, SanDisk’s Cruzer USB flash drives have been partitioned into two parts. One part is named U3 and contains some Windows-only software that can be used to protect files stored on the other partition. This software is useless to Mac users and the U3 partition just becomes an annoyance. So, many people have wondered how they can delete this U3 partition. Until recently one needed to download and use a Windows-only application made by Cruzer. Finally, in Jan 2010, Cruzer released a Mac application which can be used to get rid of the U3 partition.

You can download the application from here.

Once it’s downloaded you can open it and start its installation. Be aware that installation will require you to restart your Mac.

After the restart you’ll find several applications in a folder named “SanDisk Cruzer” in your /Applications/Utilities folder.

Open up the application named “LaunchPad Removal Utility for Mac” and follow the on-screen instructions. I found one part of the instructions confusing. It asks if you want to backup the data. I thought it was referring to the data on the other partition, but that is apparently not the case. I figured out that it was only referring to the data on the U3 partition, not the data on the main partition where you put your files. So, I told the application to go ahead and remove the partition without backing up data. I waited 30 seconds and it finished the process successfully and all of my data on the main partition was still intact.

Even though I told you that the application won’t erase your data on the USB flash drive I still recommend that you backup the data on the USB flash drive just in case something goes wrong. I don’t want you to lose any of your data.

This post builds upon the information that I presented in my last blog entry about how to securely store personal information on your Mac. A disk image file is a special kind of file. When a disk image file is opened it makes the computer think that an actual disk, like a CD, has been physically inserted into the computer. Thus, a disk image file, or more simply a disk image, can be thought of as a virtual disk.

How to create and use a password-protected (encrypted) disk image in Mac OS X 10.4, 10.5 or 10.6

1. Go to your Applications folder and open the Utilities folder.

2. Open Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities/).

3. Click the “New Image” button, or choose New > Blank Disk Image from the Disk Utility File menu.

• Enter a name for your disk image file in the Save As field

• Change the save destination to either your Documents folder or your Desktop, whichever you prefer.

• Set Volume Name set to “Virtual Disk” (In 10.6 the field is called “Name”, not “Volume Name”)

• Select a Volume Size for the image file. If you’re just going to store a few Word or Excel files in the disk image then 10 or 20 MB should be large enough. (In OS X 10.6 40 MB is the smallest you can select.) You can choose any size you’d like by selecting “Custom” at the bottom. If you ever fill your disk image you can always create a larger one and move the files from the smaller disk image to the larger one.

• Leave the volume format set to “Mac OS X Extended (Journaled)” (In 10.6 the field is called “Format”, not “Volume Format”)

• Leave “Partitions” set to “No partition map”

• Leave the Image Format set to “read/write disk image”

• Set Encryption to “128-bit AES” if your Mac uses Mac OS X 10.4. Choose “256-bit AES” if your Mac uses Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.6

Warning: If you forget the password to your encrypted disk image, your data will be irretrievably lost so please write down your password on a piece of paper. This is just a precautionary measure.

• Click the Create button.

• Important: In this next step you’ll need to first uncheck “Remember password (add to keychain)” then twice enter a strong password. This password is used to secure your disk image.  [By "strong password," I mean one this is long and contains a mix of letter, numbers, odd capitalization and punctuation marks or at least most of these features. For example, 1%milKisgooDforyoU is a strong password.]

• Click OK

4. The disk image file will be created and then it’ll be opened automatically.

5. Look at your Desktop you should see an icon named Virtual Disk. This is what appears whenever your disk image is opened. Copy a file into this Virtual Disk. Notice that the file will automatically be copied when you put it in the Virtual Disk. The original file will remain where it is so you’ll probably want to put it into the Trash in a couple of days after you’re sure you understand how your new disk image works.

6. Close Virtual Disk by dragging its icon to the Trash, which will eject this virtual or fake disk.

7. Now, locate your disk image file. (It’s in the location that you selected in step 3, second bullet). Double-click your disk image file. Enter your password when prompted and then click the “OK” button. You should now see the icon for Virtual Disk again. Open it and you’ll see the file that you copied into it.

8. Now that you know how to use your disk image you can copy more files into it and you can delete the originals.

9. Don’t leave your Virtual Disk on the Desktop all day long. That defeats the added security. Only open it when you need it and then close it when you’re done by dragging its icon to the Trash icon on your Dock.

Do you have personal or sensitive information about yourself or your clients on your Mac? Such as credit card numbers or passwords? If so, I recommend storing this information in a special kind of file known as an encrypted disk image. I store a list of my own passwords and other sensitive information in such a file on my Mac laptop. This file is thus always readily available while still being inaccessible by others even if my laptop were stolen.

Without getting very technical, disk images were invented as a way to make a backup copy of a disk such as a floppy or CD, but other uses have emerged over time. Mac OS X lets you create a blank disk image that can be thought of as an empty folder. Additionally, this file can be encrypted which requires a password when you open it. Thus, in an over-simplified way, you can think of an encrypted disk image as a password-protected folder.

Read my next blog post for step-by-step instructions on how to create and use an encrypted disk image on your Mac.