bganoush
asked on
Secure Erase Seperating Fact From Fiction...
Hello World!
Can someone tell me if the following statements are fact or fiction...
1) After you overwrite data, there still remains a "ghost" of the original image so when erasing data, you must overwrite the sectors multiple times to "really" erase the data.
2) A low level format makes sure that no data can ever be retrieved from a hard drive.
I am writing a hard drive purging software that simply opens every free block of a drive and will write all "0"s into them and then all "1"s into them. To clear the the TOC entries without having to reformat, I create a large number of empty files in a hierarchical tree structure and then I delete those files once done. Is this a waste of time?
-- Bubba
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~grins~
My online name of "Bartender_1" stems from many years ago, when I used to work as a bartender, but I appreciate the humor. ~LOL~
I'd recommend you check out DBAN, use it on your disks, and then try to get the data off of the disk. use whatever means you wish, and see if it meets your standards.
:o)
Bartender_1
My online name of "Bartender_1" stems from many years ago, when I used to work as a bartender, but I appreciate the humor. ~LOL~
I'd recommend you check out DBAN, use it on your disks, and then try to get the data off of the disk. use whatever means you wish, and see if it meets your standards.
:o)
Bartender_1
ASKER
Hah...
I just had to comment... not about your answer but because your ID is "Bartender" and you work for the Canadian Government... You're proliferating the myth that the country is run from a pub... now what will americans be thinking???
Anyway, thanks for your answers. I work in a "Privacy" scenario where someone might sue us for leaving a data trail. Because some hardware doesn't come cheap, we prefer to flush the data before destoying the media. In some cases, people are just too hung up on the issue but I have been deligated to erase what I can.
I did have a suspicion that the head could "travel" across a track but I also thought that there was a certain amount of overlap between tracks where the data from both adjacent tracks are blended to a point where you really couldn't tell what the original data was... It makes more sense as you put it that there is no overlap but in fact that the data is written loosely across a track.
In any case, thanks.