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How does SecureErase work?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 29 May 2024
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THIS IS THE HILL I DIE ON.
No one has ever recovered overwritten data, as far as anyone can tell. Go look it up. The technique was only a theoretical attack on ancient MFM/RLL hard drive encoding (Gutmann's paper). Even 20 year old drives' (post 2001, approx) magnetic encoding are so small there isn't an 'edge' to read on the bits. A single pass of random data is sufficient to permanently destroy data, even against nation-state level actors. Certainly enough for personal data.
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutmann_method :
More reading material:
NOW THAT BEING SAID there is no harm in doing a secure, 35-pass overwrite other than the time, energy and disk wear. If watching all the bit-patterns of a DoD-level wipe using DBAN on a magnetic disk tickles your fancy, or you think this is a CIA misinformation campaign to get people to do something insecure so they can steal your secrets, please just go ahead and do a 35-pass overwrite with alternating bit patterns followed by random data. I can tell you that I believe in my heart-of-hearts, that one pass is sufficient.
This is exactly what a cia analyst whose tan literally comes from their monitors and is never let out of Langley’s 38th sub basement would say.
Guess we’re doing 40 passes. Just to be sure. ;)
Interesting. We mostly use DBAN at work because it's a one-button process you can walk away from, and it has drivers for hardware old enough that we're disposing it. Nobody's ever selected the fancy super-paranoid stuff as far as I know.
If the hardware won't boot, we take a layer-1 approach instead :D
When I worked at the e-waste recycle and technomancery place we'd do secure wipes for any hard drives they dropped off with their stuff.
And one time somepne asked if we could do a Gutmann wipe for his hard drive.
His 10TB hard drive.
In my industry we destroy all storage devices when computers are returned at end of lease, or decommissioned.