Unshredding is all about reassembling shredded documents that are in bits and pieces. We may tend to think that shredding is the last step to destroying a document and some of the times that is the truth. But then again, with the different types of shredders, each one of them with varying qualities, the opposite often becomes the fact. As personal shredders do not operate with the same amount of efficiency as the industrial ones, this has given rise to the possibility of unshredding the documents by reconstructing them. On shredding, the pieces often tend to stick together, thus making it a little easier to reconstruct them. If the documents are fed into the shredder with the lines of text not perpendicular to the blades, then the text would still be legible on the end results, which are the bits of noodles the document has been converted to.



Since the early days of shredding many attempts were made to reconstruct such processed documents and back then, it all had to be done manually. During the Iranian revolution and their takeover of the US embassy back in 1979, many sensitive documents were shredded by the US security forces. The Iranians took the help of the local carpet weavers to manually unshred such documents successfully. Most of these recovered documents were released by the Iranians in book format titled “Documents from the US espionage Den”. Since then, when it come to destroying documents the US embassy made full use pulverizing, pulping and chemical decomposition to secure the shredded documents.



Machine shredded paper, though confetti to a very large extent can be reconstructed. And with the advantage that modern computing offers, the process of reassembling shredded documents is put on the fast-track. This involves the computer scanning the bits and pieces, on both sides and positioning them as determined by it. In May 2007, a team of German scientists in Berlin announced to the world that they had finally developed a digital system to analyze and reconfigure the pieces and in the process, reconstruct the document. But it had taken them 4 years to just develop the system to do this. Now the engineers are hoping that their software system and the scanners would do the job in no time at all, even after taking into account the various sizes and shapes of the pieces, the durability and different paper textures, the various styles of printing used [hand writing to the dot matrix] and the varied edges of the paper itself [from sharp end to ragged and handmade]. According to Jon Schneider, the manager of the project, “the numbers are tremendous. If you imagine putting a jigsaw puzzle at home, you may have a thousand pieces and a picture of what it is supposed to be like. Here, we have millions of pieces and no idea as to what they should look like in the end”.



According to Robert Johnson of the national association for Information Destruction, the demand for document reconstruction seems to be ever growing. As things stand, many companies are offering commercial document reconstruction or unshredding as a part of their services. For optimized security while shredding documents, one should always take care to ‘process’ the documents in such a way that the lines of text are perpendicular to the blades of the machine. For example, the Enron officials in their hurry ended up shredding the Enron documents in a way that made it a lot easier for the officials to reconstruct them. Even the dreaded Stasi files of the East German secret police are being looked into as there were “millions of shredded paper that the Stasi threw into garbage bags in the final days before the fall of the wall in 1989”. Of the 16,000 bags or so, about 300 of them have been reconstructed and this took the three dozen people about 6 years to do this. The German Government is seriously considering the usage of modern computers to do this so as to speed up the entire process.



One of the problems with residential shredders, which are not related to unshredding, is the safety issue as they have been known to cause an injury every so often. As a result of their ease of operations, these types of shredders are all the more common these days and even if their openings are narrow, the cutting wheels still pose quite a considerable risk to the pets and the small children. Many of these shredders can be left in the “stand by” mode, one where if anything were to be inserted into the feed slot, the shredder would start processing it immediately. One can see the apparent risk in the “stand by” mode and this risk to one’s pets and children can be greatly reduced and all that one would have to do is to all unplug the machine when not using it.



A professional company like Shredex, part of the Florida paper shredding service, well and truly understands these risks and takes care to ensure that your documents stay destroyed. Privacy is a main concern with anyone and when it comes to your business information, it is always better to utilize the services of a professional company similar to or as shredex to destroy all that is not needed. The thing here is that you would be destroying all those unneeded materials in a professional manner and shredex, a part of the Florida paper shredding service does that quite well enough.

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