Immigrating with external hard drives

[GenDemo]

Hey Everyone

I have a bit of a strange question...call me paranoid.

To what extent does customs check things like the data on external hard drives, CDs, flash sticks etc. that you take over?

To put things in perspective, when we immigrate, I will be taking over 2 computers; 2 laptops; 7 external hard drives; and between my wife and I, a couple of flash sticks...oh and a LOT of DVD & CDs. My question originates from my perspective that Australia is quite strict on managing what people download and such; while in SA there are basically no rules. And should you break them, you know there is no one that is going to look for you. Again, my perception is that in Aus, they will look for you and they will find you.

So I am extremely paranoid that they are going to want to scrutinise every megabyte of data on each and every hard drive I have when we go through customs.

I would appreciate any insight regarding my paranoid question.

GD

[Sunnyskies]

Lol - I often have 1 or 2 externals with me. Never had anything checked. I know people think of Australia as a nanny state, but it is really not that bad. But, if you are a pedophile or an ISIS recruiter and the police have reason to believe that then they will examine everything when they get a warrant to do so.

[EmNew]

Hi,

You are not alone in being paranoid about them checking the drives .....We've ripped our cd's and dvd's over the years onto the PC and I am copying those onto external drives which will be carried on the plane, as well as my hubby's entire Steam library. All legit, but still hard to prove you own original disks sitting in a container miles away...

Hubby is concerned about digital game downloads in the future though, with the Aussie's rating system banning certain games. However where there is will there is a way........

[BrendanH]

I think the original post above probably lit up a few switchboards at several government agencies. If it was ok before it probably isn't now

Hubby is concerned about digital game downloads in the future though, with the Aussie's rating system banning certain games. However where there is will there is a way........

I was wondering whether to buy GTA 5 before leaving but decided that every AUS$ probably counts at this point and decided to save it instead.

Edited August 13, 2015 by BAndH

[CyberJoe]

Lol BAndH. Like the comment about lighting up the gov switchboards! You could always just add a layer of encryption such a BitLocker to your external drives if you want to keep prying eyes out GenDemo? I would suggest you do that anyway in the event you lose one of the drives that might contain sensitive information about you or your family.

From a practical point of view. It sounds like at least a few Terra-bytes worth of data you are lugging along. To inspect anything of such a volume requires a large amount of time that I doubt they would be able to spend without having sufficient reason.

[monsta]

Hey,

Even if you think the risk is small, is it worth risking your future in Aussie for a few banned games?

Once you live here, you will understand why Aussies generally follow the rules more than South Africans do. The limiting factor here that holds up the economy is the limited amount of labor. I guess it boils down to this; would you rather Steve take a job making you your morning coffee at the caffee or take a job scanning hard drives? You can't have both here..

Edited August 13, 2015 by monsta

[zamunda]

I don't think you need to worry.

When we moved here, we had a similar number of data drives. No one asked us any questions.

Even if they had asked to check the drives, we were going to tell them to look through the drives if they wanted to. We did not have anything incriminating.

[RedPanda]

I think the problem is not necessarily banned games, just the regular 'piracy' type of things like: Where did you get that music? Well, from a friend, so I don't have a CD for it. Aha! and this whole series of Ghost in the Shell, hmmn? Well, uhm...the DVDs are in the other box. And if you have it on an HDD then you don't risk scratching the DVDs every time you play them.

So it's not like there is anything that would be illegal to obtain, just that some of the content was 'shared'. Typical example is that if the Aussie authorities ever went to Rage they would probably have a heart attack???

[RichardH]

I think you are being paranoid. The customs guys are far more interested in quarantine items. Declare anything remotely resembling quarantine items if you are in doubt on the form, other than that no worries...

[ProudlySouthAfricanInPerth]

I wouldnt worry, most Aussies I know pop over to Bali for a holiday and come back with illegal dvds and customs wont even bat an eyelid (unless its x-rated and very bad stuff thats not allowed here). But if its the latest movie releases they really couldnt care less so i doubt they would look at your hard drives or usbs.

[EmNew]

So it's not like there is anything that would be illegal to obtain, just that some of the content was 'shared'. Typical example is that if the Aussie authorities ever went to Rage they would probably have a heart attack???

Rage....sigh...we kept on saying we would fly to JHB each year for it, and never did. Now it's finally coming to Cape Town........one month after we leave......typical !

I know however that there is a big games / lan convention in Melbourne so at least we will finally live in a city with a big event. We've been following the ABC show Good Game for years already so have some events eyed out for Aussie.

[RedPanda]

Rage....sigh...we kept on saying we would fly to JHB each year for it, and never did. Now it's finally coming to Cape Town........one month after we leave......typical !

I know however that there is a big games / lan convention in Melbourne so at least we will finally live in a city with a big event. We've been following the ABC show Good Game for years already so have some events eyed out for Aussie.

Don't worry, we live in Johannesburg/Pretoria and haven't attended the past several years, mostly due to studies. It always seemed to fall together with some test series or other.

So we'll be looking forward to seeing what Melbourne has to offer.

[EDurand]

I had the same question for my OH, he suggested that we move our stuff to a cloud and only keep minimal things on our HD. He also has a very large Steam and Origin download on his PC, think what we will do is keep the stuff we know AUS is ok with on the HD of the computers and the ones they might not be happy about put on the cloud. I am also a little concerned about some of his x-box games, concerned when they open the container they might fine us for the games that are on their no play list, I think we should sell them over here but OH obviously wants to keep them.

GenDemo here is a link to the list of games that they do not deem suitable:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_video_games_in_Australia

http://www.refused-classification.com/

They recently also banned 220 odd games in June:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-30/australia-bans-220-video-games-in-four-months/6582100

[GenDemo]

Thnx EDurand ... its seems to be more aimed at small silly games, that the main stream games.

Amazingly, GTA is not banned.

[GenDemo]

I forgot to give an update...

So yes, I came over with 4 external hard drives in hand luggage and a bunch of memory cards and memory sticks (in my laptop bag that I had forgotten about, and only discovered when I unpacked in Auz) - absolutely no problem. They had a much bigger issue with the allen key in my laptop bag than anything else.

 

[Riekie]

We brought lots of that stuff over - no issues whatsoever.  Not even a question.  99% Of the time, you won't be asked or checked either.  They do a lot of profiling when we travel and even before we set foot in Australia, they know who we are, where we came from, where we've been etc.  If your profile is putting up a red flag, you'll be marked for further questioning. If, for instance, your a middle-aged man who travelled to countries where child exploitation is rife, then your digital posessions will be checked (even when arriving from South Africa). If you're a family, emigrating from South Africa, without any recent travel to high risk countries for drugs, piracy, pornography etc, you'll most likely be waved through.  We've recently returned from a 4 week trip to Peru (extremely high risk for drugs!) and we were not even asked to have our lugguage checked.  Our risk profile shows that we frequently travel in and out of Australia and that we've never had anything illegal on us. (Initially, we were basically checked and our bags searched each time we came back to Australia). The fact that we stayed in Peru for 4 weeks is also a low risk indicator.  They can't possibly search each and every person and each and every bag.  It's all about your travel profile, your behaviour when you get off the plane (those people standing there in the hallway as you exit the plane are not there to welcome you - they're there to check you out...) and then the odd random spot-check. 

 

The easy way around this is to not have anything on you, which you would not want anyone to know about.  Simples.  

[Waylander]

We also did not have an issue with 2 x laptops, 2 x Externals and a few USB's.

 

If you are worried about steam/origin stuff, Internet in most parts of Aus is pretty good, you can just re-download the stuff as you need it.  

 

 

[GenDemo]

2 hours ago, Waylander said:

We also did not have an issue with 2 x laptops, 2 x Externals and a few USB's.

 

If you are worried about steam/origin stuff, Internet in most parts of Aus is pretty good, you can just re-download the stuff as you need it.  

 

 

 

Ayep. I was woried that I might have games that are prohibited in Auz...

Went through a lot of trouble and effort to figure out - and Steam was not helpful! So in the end, it seems that you need to have a look at the store page of each of your games, and if there is something written just above the block with the price tag, below the videos & screenshots (see attached - restriction would be in the yellow block), then that game has a restriction. I would however recommend that people not switch their Steam accounts to Auz.