[wellylug] Darik's Boot and Nuke ("DBAN") HDD eraser

[Daniel Pittman]

Atom Smasher <atom at smasher.org> writes:
> On Wed, 2 Jun 2010, James Sullivan wrote:
>
>> My understanding is that if you wipe with just ones or zeros it's actually
>> fairly easy to recover what was there as you can easily filter out the zero
>> or one wipe. But wiping with random noise means there's no way to easily
>> filter it out.
> =============
>
> if you fill a modern drive with zeros there is NO WAY to recover any data
> previously stored on the drive... unless the drive is taken apart and subject
> to VERY expensive, time consuming and unreliable data recovery techniques.

Well, it isn't that expensive: remapped bad sectors, and stray writes outside
the track, can be recovered for as little as a few tens of thousands of
dollars.  (...and prices may have dropped since I last looked.)

Full recovery is more expensive, though.

> so unless you've pissed off the CIA, zeros are fine. this assumes that
> you're using a drive that was made within the last 10-20 years...

*nod*  As I note, a single pass overwrite with zero is enough for the .au
government, so anything more than that is going to be above and beyond.

        Daniel
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