Elmer E. Dow wrote:
Greetings:
This post is not RH specific, but given the experience level of the list participants, it seems like the likely place to seek input on this subject. If there's a more appropiate place to post, please let me know.
I'm researching available data destruction programs that I could use for getting rid of an organization's financial info, etc. before donating/disposing/reusing an old computer. Have any of you used the following programs? Good or bad experience? Any words of advice?
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Elmer,
It depends upon the level of confidentiality that you are concerned about. I can tell you flat out that none of those methods are acceptible by the Department of Defense if the hard drive has at any time contained classified information. Dark rumors abound about the ability of the NSA to recover data from a disk even if it's been overwritten multiple times. Degausing may enhance your security. All I can tell you is that we military security folks have to physically destroy the disk. If we want to donate/surplus, etc the computer, we must remove the hard drive first.
That being said, your data may not be considered "classified". In that case, you'll want something that writes to the disk, not to the partitions, and in a successive pattern of all 1's, then all 0's, then all 1's, etc. I can't remember for sure, but I think that 3-5 passess will sufficiently neutralize the underlying magnetic patterns for most purposes. If you don't mind risking damage to the disk, I'd get a powerful degausser and run that over the HD afterwards. Be warned, though, that this has been known to sufficiently magnetize internal parts and render the drive useless.
I haven't used any of the tools that you mentioned in your email, but I've heard good things about Wipe.
Ben
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