I need to wipe my Hard Drive clean.

Originally posted by ghondon

Originally posted by FTD Brat
reply to post by ghondon

 

So you mean to say that there's "high tech" recovery software out there that can successfully recover files from an indecipherable sea of 0's, I'd love to know what it's called so I can test it myself!

As long as the hard drive is working, there's nothing you can do short of taking a sledgehammer to it to make sure the data are really gone," says Ben Carmitchel of ESS Data Recovery. "For every technology developed to erase the data, it's our job to counter that."


and thats just some schmuck at a data recovery company imagine what the cia has acces to.

edit on 9-7-2011 by ghondon because: added more

Since he is in the business of recovering data I would expect him to say that. Most people wipe files so there is always a trace left behind, they exploit this knowledge. If you overwrite the correct information there is absolutely no way it can be recovered.

Yes - fact is if you overwrite the data blocks on a drive with 1/0s enough times - there IS NO DATA to be retrieved. It's empty, gone, vanished.
Data is recovered because most people don't delete it properly and it therefore resides on the disk in areas only "marked" for deletion as opposed to those that have actually been cleaned back to their factory level of binary 1/0's.
I would just love to see some company recover data from such a drive - because it's not possible.

Theoretically, it's possible to use a magnetic force microscope to analyse the disk and recover the very faint, latent magnetisation of the surface, even after the disk has been erased.

In practice, and as far as I know, nobody tried it, and it would cost a huge amount of time, specially with modern, high capacity disks.

Overwriting is enough.

PS: but to be sure, it's better to use a program that overwrites data with random patterns instead of just 0s and 1s, that way it would be more difficult to distinguish between was overwritten and what was written by the overwriting program.