All, Do you all agree with Peter Gutman's conclusion on his theory that data can never really be erased, as noted in his quote below: "Data overwritten once or twice may be recovered by subtracting what is expected to be read from a storage location from what is actually read. Data which is overwritten an arbitrarily large number of times can still be recovered provided that the new data isn't written to the same location as the original data (for magnetic media), or that the recovery attempt is carried out fairly soon after the new data was written (for RAM). For this reason it is effectively impossible to sanitise storage locations by simple overwriting them, no matter how many overwrite passes are made or what data patterns are written. However by using the relatively simple methods presented in this paper the task of an attacker can be made significantly more difficult, if not prohibitively expensive." It seems that the perhaps the only real way to rid your Hard Drives of data is to burn them. I'd love to hear some thoughts on this from security and data experts out there.
