I looked into this before donating some computers and there is
apparently a DoD (Dept of Defense) standard on how many times you have
to wipe or write over the data on the drive before it's considered
secure and clean. The software programs for this often refer to meeting
the DoD standard.
Chris
Michael Perelman wrote:
Bill, I don't understand. I though that the system magnetically writes a 0 or a 1 on
each location & that programs are available that overwrite everything with 0's. Are
you saying that the spot on the drive can be a 0 with a residue of a 1?
On Fri, Mar 07, 2008 at 09:22:35AM -0600, Bill Lear wrote:
Not reliably. First, wiping an ENTIRE disk is easy, but you have to
hit each byte on the disk with multiple patterns of write ---
otherwise you risk leaving enough information to recover. Writing the
Bible over things just overlays those bytes on top of others and is
sort of like writing 555-1212 down, then writing 123-4567 on top ---
you can still make out the 555-1212 part, and you need to write many
more things on top of it until it is fully obscured.
Wiping a single file is MUCH harder, as the operating system or
application may have stored copies of it in various places (temporary
files, swap space for the OS, etc.).
Bill
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
