One thing I have noticed when reading some articles across the Internet regarding data destruction is many recommendations are on the ‘paranoid level’. I have seen articles/forum posts where people talk about 0 writing their hard drive 5+ times and then taking it apart and smashing the disks. First of all, 99.999% of the data out there is worthless to anyone except the owner and second, 99.999% of people who would try to steal this data would pick the ‘low hanging fruit’ where they find a drive which has data on it and exploit it.
The point of this is simply if you are getting rid of a hard drive with important data on it, 0 writing it one time is enough. I’ve written a tip about this in the past which references the Ultimate Boot CD as a great resource for easily getting access to the tools you need.
Let’s be realistic, nobody is going to be running your hard drive through rediculously sophisticated and expensive hardware to try to steal your data.
Jason Faulkner is the man who brings you our daily tips. He is based in Atlanta, Georgia.
I went to the web site in your past article but couldn’t find where you actually download the UBCD, found a lot of others but not this one???..I’m confused, please help..
Thanks in advance
Dennis
I concur.
I’ve always just used dban to quickly wipe my drives before I resell them or throw them away http://www.dban.org/
The county I work for wipes them, and then has the recycler we use drill them. This information, and what’s in the linked article, is very interesting. Wiping a drive 7 times over 20 hours might just be overkill. However, TV crime dramas showing a hdd that’s been through a firebombing, yielding pristine video footage to help the cops nail a criminal doesn’t exactly paint a realistic picture for people.
Both pros and cons to the article’s premis. Depends on what and from whome you’re trying to hide. Financial data gets the full treatment; not zeros but random data, for 5 cycles.