Another approach is to encrypt the drive or partition and use a serious
password. Then complete erasure is unimportant.
-Don
Brian C Merrell wrote:
Unfortunately, you can never be sure. As someone pointed out, some
filesystems take snapshots. So things like 'shred' and rewriting the
entire filesystem with zeros over and over again are the best you can hope
for.
The NSA and DoD require that the drive be physically destroyed. They
degauss it and often then hit it with something large and heavy. It then
has to be certified that it's beyond recovery.
http://www.spectrumwest.com/Attach2.htm
As you might expect, this is actually a lot of trouble for an IT-heavy
place like the NSA or most DoD facilities these days -- lots of media to
take care of -- so the more practical solution is to toss it in a
cardboard box and leave it in a vault for eternity, or at least until some
(infrequent) mandate from up on high comes around for them to clean up
such things.
