Re: [gentoo-user] Securely deletion of an HDD

[Marc Joliet <marcec@gmx.de>]

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Am Sun, 12 Jul 2015 22:43:44 +0200
schrieb Volker Armin Hemmann <volkerarmin@googlemail.com>:

> http://www.howtogeek.com/115573/htg-explains-why-you-only-have-to-wipe-a-disk-once-to-erase-it/

Yeah, that was linked from the Arch wiki I looked at.

> http://www.vidarholen.net/~vidar/overwriting_hard_drive_data.pdf

FWIW, Peter Gutmann doesn't have much good to say about that article
(specifically, he wrote about the related blog article at [0] in his "Further
Epilogue" at [1]). Regardless, the summary still seems to be: with
modern high-density drives, there is *no* wiggle room outside for remnants of
data to stick around after overwriting it, outside of some potential future
method that is probably a) far enough away into the future that the data on the
drive is uninteresting by then (if it ever was interesting to begin with!) and
b) prohibitively expensive (at least at the start), which pushes the earliest
time someone might ever look at my old hard drives even further back.  This
assumes that anybody is interested in developing something like that, if it's
even possible.

I can't help but wonder what the situation is like with tape, which still
commonly used for backups. ISTR that huge densities are also the norm there, but
that's about all I know.

[0]
https://web.archive.org/web/20090722235051/http://sansforensics.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/overwriting-hard-drive-data
[1] https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html
-- 
Marc Joliet
--
"People who think they know everything really annoy those of us who know we
don't" - Bjarne Stroustrup

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