On Nov 11, 2011, at 11:37 AM, Darren Addy wrote: > For the truly paranoid: > Simply formatting a drive is like removing the Table of Contents/Index > pages from a book but leaving all of the pages with information still > there, if someone wants to look for it. Sure the possibility of > someone really wanting to is small, but what the truly paranoid are > looking for is not data obfuscation but data DESTRUCTION: > http://www.microsoft.com/athome/organization/personalfiles.aspx > http://pcsupport.about.com/od/toolsofthetrade/tp/free-data-destruction-software.htm > > Darren Addy > Kearney, Nebraska
On the Mac, the Disc Utility has a disc erasure option. Within that there is a setting for security level. Lowest level is a deletion of the Directory, the highest of 5 is IIRC an option to overwrite the disc 32 times with random 0's and 1's. The truly paranoid organization for which I used to work did not accept that as sufficient; instead I was required to do the multiple overwrites, and then take out the HD, remove the media from the drive, expose it to a humongous magnet, and then physical destroy the media. Of course this is the same organization which allowed used USB thumb-drives with classified docs intact to be sold on the streets in Afghanistan, so there may be something here about locking the barn door after the horse has been taken . . . stan -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
