in reply to Cleaning up your hard disk

I suggest a heavy earth magnet because the truly paranoid know that new drives store all your secrets into the low level DRM partition that we mortals can't reach :-)

...insert nervous laughter...

On a slightly serious note, I wonder if this is one of the reasons PGP suggests nine passes to wipe a disk? Whatever type of cache is used for something like this can only hold so much data, and this could potentially push your, uhm, "evidence" out of the cache.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Re: Cleaning up your hard disk
by toma (Vicar) on Jan 27, 2004 at 08:53 UTC
    See Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory: "Since degaussing destroys the sync bytes, ID fields, error correction information, and other paraphernalia needed to identify sectors on the media, thus rendering the drive unusable, it makes the degaussing process mostly equivalent to physical destruction."

    This paper is cited in the documentation of the shred program, which uses 25 passes of overwriting as the default. shred -u -z -f $* seems to work okay in place of /bin/rm.

    It should work perfectly the first time! - toma

      Waaay offtopic, but...

      The juxtaposition of shred needing 25 passes to really overwrite securely and your signature is immensely amusing.


      Once it's Turing complete, everything else is just syntactic sugar.