On 20/5/05, Doug Franklin, discombobulated, unleashed: >If that's what they told you, they sold you a load of shite. The >forensic recovery techniques for hard drives rely on the mechanical and >thermal drift of the heads (and therefore tracks) over time. It's >highly unlikely that a series of writes in quick succession would drift >enough to obliterate the excursions that a serious forensic data >recovery effort (read government agency) is going to try to exploit. >If you _really_ want to obliterate magnetic recordings, you need to >blast them with nontrivial amounts of magnetic flux. If you're going >to try to obliterate them yourself, you have to use the "obliterate" >software multiple times _over_ _time_.
Doug's right. But more: I have filmed at one of the world's leading information recovery services here in the UK, where they specialise in data recovery. <http://www.vogon-international.com/> They have techniques so sophisticated that the managing director told me over a pre-filming cup of nice hot Brownian motion producer (tea) that there is no safe method for burying info on a traditional computer hard drive. He was matter-of-fact about it and said that the only way to be sure was to hammer a large nail through the platters and then burn them!!! If it's that crucial, replace the drive before selling the computer on ;-) Cheers, Cotty ___/\__ || (O) | People, Places, Pastiche ||=====| http://www.cottysnaps.com _____________________________
