There was a sweet spot in the mid to late 90s where you could find awesome ancient hardware at Goodwill. Around that time I lived in a town of about 150K people, so it had several Goodwill locations, but there was one where all of the computer equipment got sent. My last good score there was a PDP-11/7-something that was in perfect working order with a hard drive for something insane like $20, and the hard drive came complete with about 100 people's personal details *and* mental health records on it. And that's why they have that (very good) policy.
I know someone who scored a couple of very large VAXen from the prison service, and discovered they contained a lot - really a lot - of records of prisoner details that should absolutely not have made it out of the door.
Cue a couple of police and prison service cars rolling up outside his house and disgorging a lot of very beardy old sysadmins, who copied everything off onto modern media and wiped the drivers. They then offered the guy a contract to maintain the VAXen they still had, and help in the project to transfer stuff onto more modern databases.
Things became interesting when the guy got jailed for a few months for a minor incident that escalated a bit, but still needed to be given access to the prison service computers...
