Jim Flanagan wrote:
Greg Freemyer wrote:
On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 6:38 AM, Hans defaber <hans.defaber@gmail.com> wrote:
What is the best (easiest) way to overwrite old harddisks with random garbage ?
thanks, Hans
Lots of ways, but the easiest is "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=4k conv=noerror"
Basically everything beyond that is overkill. Even NIST has started buying off on the above for drive 20GB or larger. holding confidential data (Older, less dense drives need more passes, random data, etc.) For more secret data, they require physical destruction I think.. I have not seen any docs that cover drives holding top secret data etc.
If you need a boot CD/floppy look into dban.
If you think you data is worth someone attempting a multi-million dollar recovery on and you think their is an ultra-secret government agency that actually has some SciFi like ability to recovery overwritten data, then take it apart and belt sand the magnetic media off of each platter. You should probably do that while wearing an aluminum hat. That way they can't be reading your mind during the process and somehow be using you as a transmitter to read your data.
Greg
Or you could encrypt it with strong encryption. Not sure how, but I hear its done.
Encryption does NOT prevent anyone from reading your messages or data. All it does is raise the amount of effort and time which must be devoted to reading it. Given sufficient time and computing power, all encryption will be cracked. The key is to use enough encryption such that the data which is protected isn't worth as much as the equipment needed to decrypt it and that once it is decrypted, it took so long that the information is no longer useful. If you cannot meet those two conditions, then you must keep physical control of the data, and ensure that it is destroyed before anyone can copy the encrypted data. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org