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Secure deletion: a single overwrite will do it

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40hz:
Interesting article over at Heise Online

Link: http://www.heise-online.co.uk/news/Secure-deletion-a-single-overwrite-will-do-it--/112432

Secure deletion: a single overwrite will do it

The myth that to delete data really securely from a hard disk you have to overwrite it many times, using different patterns, has persisted for decades, despite the fact that even firms specialising in data recovery, openly admit that if a hard disk is overwritten with zeros just once, all of its data is irretrievably lost.


Craig Wright, a forensics expert, claims to have put this legend finally to rest.
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mouser:
Nice find.. seems like we have another case of a theoretically vulnerability that for all intents and purposes is not worth worrying about..

It's probably all not just that multiple-overwrites don't gain you anything meaningful, but that a cost-benefit analysis would probably show that the risk of causing a hardware failure from it is non-trivial.

Stoic Joker:
The multi pass thing always did bother me as it just didn't make sense. As tightly packed as data is on modern drives the possibility of information being left over in the between space just never struck me as rational. Sure on the old magnetic tapes (Like 8-Tracks) there was plenty of room for that to happen but as tightly as they're packing data these days I doubt there is really between space left.

Thanks 40hz

nosh:
Slightly OT but this is something that's been perplexing me for a while.

I have a friend who had a bad HDD crash a couple of years back and handed it to some professional data recovery guys. He swears that the amount of data recovered was much more than the actual capacity of the hard disk.

cranioscopical:
He swears that the amount of data recovered was much more than the actual capacity of the hard disk.-nosh (January 18, 2009, 11:59 PM)
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Hey!  I started with 1TB and now I'm down to 40GB.  Tell your friend that I want my data back!

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