If you don't believe me, call them up and ask them if they can recover a disk
They are typically taking advantage of the fact that Windows doesn't zero out the data blocks, just changes the directory to mark the space free. Most drive recovery companies can't recover a drive that has had its data overwrittenĮven once. The reason to perform multipass writes is to take advantage of the slight errors in positioning to overwrite the edges of the track also, making recovery far less likely. Microscopic magnetic probe), but it practice you would need the resources of a diskĭrive maker or one of the three letter government organizations to do this.
Theoretically, you could recoverĭata off of the outer edges of each track (using a scanning electron microscope or Shred the disks before disposing of machines anyway. HIPAA only requires DOD 3-pass overwrite,Īnd I am not certain why DOD even has a 7 pass overwrite as it seems they just simply however if you want to use gutmann in spite of this, check out the secure-delete package for linux.ħ pass and 35 pass would take forever to finish. and as for big brother, if the DoD considers it gone then you know its gone, the military industrial complex gets all the big bucks to try and do exactly what gutmann claims they can do, and believe you me if they had the tech to do so it would already have been leaked to the private sector since they're all in bed with each other. no private organisation to-date has successfully recovered data from even a single random pass. The gutmann method is based on tin-foil hat speculation, it does various things to get drives to degauss themselves, which is admirable in an artistic sense, but pragmatically its overkill. then next time think twice about housing shred-worthy data on the same medium as "low-clearance" stuff. if you need to "shred" a file, well, "delete" it and fill your drive with random data files until it runs out of space. Never trust "single file shredding", especially on solid state mediums like flash drives. under magnetic microscopy the data is still there, its just "faded". the first two will grey out residual bits, the last random pass will obliterate any "residual residual" bits. One random pass is enough for plausible deniability, as the lost data will have to be mostly "reconstructed" with a margin of error that grows with the length of the data trying to be recovered, as well as whether or not the data is contiguous (most cases, its not).įor the insanely paranoid, three passes is good.