Secure deletion of data. This can be a difficult problem as multiple copies of the data may exist: caches, older versions, backups, etc.
For the destruction of storage media (which as a side effect disposes of the data stored on it, but only if no other copies exist), see the tag destruction.
Lots of different programs, such as Darik's Boot and Nuke, let you write over a hard drive multiple times under the guise of it being more secure than just doing it once. Why?
As storage technologies change over time, using different encodings and remappings to deal with sector errors, the best way to permanently erase/wipe/shred data changes also.
Methods for flash drives and other solid-state drives are covered nicely…
I'm selling a computer with an SSD (it's a Lenovo ThinkPad Carbon X1). I wiped the drive using Parted Magic. I used the ATA method. I'm not sure what that is but it was the only setting available. It said it would take two minutes but the wipe was…
After decades of hearing that "delete" does not really make the data impossible to recover, I have to ask WHY the OS was not corrected long ago to do what it should have been doing all along? What is the big deal? Can't the system just trundle along…
According to the documentation for the "diskscrb" command for wiping conventional hard drives: http://www.forensics-intl.com/diskscrb.html
"Conforms to and exceeds the Government Standard set forth in DoD 5220.22-M. Can overwrite ambient data areas…
I was reading another post on destroying IDE drives, and how you could remove data, wipe it, or just destroy the drive. The removed data would still be there in some state, although not easily reachable without software. Wiped data is just removed…
I'd like to wipe a stack of drives (spinning and SSD) securely. I'm familiar with the ATA Secure Erase (SE) command via hdparm, but I'm not sure if I should use the Security Erase (SE+) command instead.
There is some evidence that these commands…
From reading around on the internet I get the impression that barring physical damage, deleted data can be always be recovered using sophisticated digital forensics.
For this reason the advice is that you should encrypt your data.
So at what point…
I want to wipe all residual data left behind even after a format on a regular 64GB fash drive, the ones someone can scan and recover data. What's the most efficient but quickest way to do this? Any test software I can scan for those residual files…
Working with a non-profit organization,it's common to reuse hard drives that have previously stored highly sensitive information such as medical and financial records. This is primarily driven by cost-saving measures to reduce purchasing new hard…
I would like to know if there is a way to securely erase USB flash drives without a chance to recover data from it once it has been erased. I know, that programms like DBAN can be used to securely erase HDDs, but as they work different from flash…
As far as I know, there is a table of files present in the hard drive that does not contain the data of each file but can point you to it.
When you delete a file, the record of it gets deleted from the file table, but the data remains on the…
The password manager that I use has instructions to migrate to a new file format:
Export existing passwords to a temporary text file
Change password manager to new format
Import passwords from temporary text file
Securely erase the temporary text…
If the goal is to make data no longer retrievable, how secure is it to format the disk? I assumed formatting the disk overwrites free space (thus making it a safe bet no one's going to be able to retrieve the data) but according to webopedia this is…
My company has a policy that files have to be shredded after they've been read. They provide with a tool shred.exe that I run on the file and it overwrites it with garbage in the file system before unlinking it.
Today I forgot to do that and I…
