Todd Walton wrote:
I don't want to buy it, but I have a question. How hard is it to erase tapes? We hear a lot about hard drives being sold on ebay and having data insecurely deleted from it. Different equipment can recover data overwritten up to so many times. And so on. What about tapes?
"securely" erase tapes? Not easy. The kind of erase I would do is akin to dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda if you were erasing a hard disk. that's essentially what 'mt erase' does, except it preserves formatting information. So, yes, whoever bought the tape drive *could* potentially get my data off the tape, but I'd find it surprising if someone really wanted my data that badly. It's not really anything most people would be interested in anyways.
so, I find it an acceptable risk to simply soft-erase the tape and be done with it. :)
-kelsey -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
