On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 1:44 PM, Morris Dovey <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mrdovey@iedu.com">mrdovey@iedu.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="im">Nathan Stien wrote:<br>
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In the above link, the author says that multi-pass hard drive wiping programs are silly, because overwriting data once with zeroes is enough to make it unrecoverable to forensics experts. This is definitely counter to what I have been taught, and I'm curious what y'all think about it.<br>
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Methinks it depends on {1} how the drive was used and (2) on the resourcefulness of the folks wanting to recover the data.<br>
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If the data areas were changed frequently, then there may be less risk; and if the data areas were changed only infrequently and read back with very much more sensitive amplifiers, it might be possible to recover a much larger portion of the content.<br>
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-- <br>
Morris Dovey<br>
DeSoto Solar<br>
DeSoto, Iowa USA<br>
<a href="http://www.iedu.com/DeSoto/" target="_blank">http://www.iedu.com/DeSoto/</a></font><div><div></div><div class="h5"><br>
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</div></div></blockquote></div><br>Whenever I hear of people drilling holes through functioning hard drives, it makes me sad and angry. Its a perfectly good drive! Why are you destroying it?? If you are THAT worried about your data, do a 3 pass wipe with DBAN, and then you have a good hard drive with no chance of getting the data off. <br>
<br>If I remember right, a 3 pass DBAN wipe is<br>1. all 0's<br>2. random bits called "Mersenne twister" <br>3. all 0's again.<br><br>I think that is a Department of Defense complaint way to wipe your hard drive. I worked for an organization that stored DOD medical records, and that's what we did with the drives before returning the leased machines to our leasing company (or selling them to employee's or whatnot).<br>
<br>I know people say they don't have time to do that, time is money, blah, blah. First off, it takes very little time to boot up DBAN and start a wipe. You don't have to babysit it. Second, I think those people just want to drill holes in stuff and grunt like Tim the Tool Man Taylor more than they care how much time they are spending wiping a drive.<br>