Conventional wisdom and sound data protection practices suggest that you should keep old hard drives, just in case of emergency. But for those who can't resist the temptation, here are a few of the most exciting methods to destroy a hard drive. Be sure to check out BuzzFeed for more inspiration:

No doubt you’ve heard about the Heartbleed bug and and how a simple coding error in OpenSSL, the Internet's most popular open source cryptographic library, has exposed countless passwords and security credentials to online hackers. Internet services have updated their systems and strengthened security in response to Heartbleed, which is used by more than two-thirds of web servers worldwide, but the vulnerability highlights the often hidden threats to data security. Here, Joel Berman, Acronis fellow and longtime IT professional, explains the implications of surreptitious malware threats such as Heartbleed and explains how image backup could help IT pros prevent data loss in the first place.

Data center fires are no joking matter. They can happen to any organization, big or small, as Samsung found this week when its South Korean data center caught fire. The damage caused a global service outage for Samsung customers. Here's the latest on data disaster prevention methods, and other data protection news from around the Web this week:

Did you know that all of "Toy Story 2" was nearly wiped out? Or that Kurt Vonnegut predicted the future of storage? From punch cards to clouds, here's a look at man's quest to protect our greatest asset: data.