These are all very good techniques to use if you are really worried
about it. But do you really want to spend the time? Not to say I
don't completely respect the ideals of protecting what is considered
private information.
First, I think it comes back to John Niven's point about anybody
actually bothering. And if they did, what is the most damaging
information that could be recovered? Student grades? Who is going to
care except for the student in question?
A while back I inherited 40 Macintosh computers (mostly SEs) from the
University of Washington when they decided to clean house. The folks
at the UW did not even bother to wipe the disks at all. I acquired 40
university computers with disks full of student, teacher, and personnel
information combined with various reports, essays, and recommendation
letters. Most of the machines belonged to teachers evidently, but
there were a few lab machines in the mix.
In the midst of all this, there is virtually no information at all that
could be used to any ill end. Even on the teachers computers', the
worst thing I found was on a Centris 650 that obviously had belonged to
an administrator of some sort that listed various professors' salaries
from 1986 through 1991. While mildly educational on the average
Radiology professor's salary 20 years ago, there was little else the
information could be used for aside for satisfying the urge to be
really nosey.
No SS or credit card numbers, or bank information. Names and
addresses, sure, but you can get those looking in the phonebook, no? I
ended up wiping most of them myself. Even if I had wanted to, it would
have taken forever to look at everything on 40 different computer
systems.
anyway, the point is, I would not worry about wasting large amounts of
time doing "Government-level" wipes on a bunch of school computers when
it's 99% probable they don't contain much information that could be
used for anything damaging. If you know for a fact some of them might
have been used to store credit card information or things of that
nature, I would concentrate my time doing thorough wipes of those
particular disks and settle with regular formats on the rest of them.
Though I find the possibility of any 'bad' information highly unlikely
if these are computers from any kind of public school system.
Especially if a large university didn't even see it worth their time to
wipe anything.
The bottom line is most people don't care enough to try. And if they
do, they're going to be wasting their time. After all, it's not like
these are computers from some kind of accounting office.
-Nat
On Wednesday, July 6, 2005, at 08:34 PM, Peter da Silva wrote:
What would be a way to completely erase these drives
so some undelete utility wouldn't pick up anything
from our school?
So long as you aren't worried about someone disassembling the drives
so they can use analog techniques...
If you just delete everything THEN fill the disk up with a bunch
of files from another disk, and do that a couple of times, it's
gonna be pretty unlikely there will be any unscrambled sectors
containing useful info.
You can try that and then run your undeleter and see what's left.
--
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