Comment by prirun
4 hours ago
Backblaze erasure-codes customer data across 17 (I think) servers, so customer data is probably not accessible. Yes, it would be better if they zeroed the drive, but Google says that will take 14-30 hours for a 10TB drive.
For drives that implement an internal encryption key, it's faster (instantaneous) to reset the encryption key. It won't give you a zeroed drive, but one filled with garbage.
In many erasure coding systems, the first X sets of code are simply cleartext chunks.
This is also more efficient in the happy path since then no computation is needed to decode the data. It can be DMA'd straight from the drive to the network adapter with super low CPU utilisation even for Gbps of network traffic.
The earlier description is ambiguous (i.e., is it data of or about customers, and is that data cleartext), but it seems they believe they have a drive from Backblaze with a lot of cleartext files on it, and something involving customers.
> It contained terabytes of customer data, and a shit ton of cleartext files.