There was an interesting discussion on bugtraq a while back about whether you could _ever_ really delete data with 100% certainty, even with a million wipes of truly random garbage. For more info: http://archive.cert.uni-stuttgart.de/archive/bugtraq/2005/07/msg00466.html
As it turns out, the most secure way of "wiping your drive" is to simply never write unencrypted information to it - while any encryption algorithm (sans one-time pad, which isn't relevant to this) can be brute-forced, you at least know the time frame for that. When it comes to grabbing stuff off a "35 passes of zeroes" drive, there's no such theory involved. Of course, this is the pedantic way of approaching the problem. If you toss DBAN in and use the super-paranoid wipe option (I forget what they call it), you are safe in 99.9% of cases, even with government-level resources being tossed at the problem - from what I understand, anyways. -DMZ On Wed, 2006-12-13 at 14:48 -0500, Nick Cummings wrote: > I was looking at information on this recently and saw the claim that even > if you just re-write a drive with zeros, that will basically assure that > the only way any data could be recovered is if the drive is disassembled > and processed with expensive, specialized equipment. I would tend to > believe this (as I would expect that all the ordinary HD interface would > allow the system to read is the last written value to a particular address > on the drive) but I don't know really know much about hard drives, file > systems etc. Anyone know if this is the case? > > If so, that would seem to suggest that that would already protect against > almost anyone but governments and other large, well-funded organizations > recovering data. As such, I'd think that's more than sufficient for the > needs of most ordinary people. > > Nick
