Saw this tidbit of news a little while back:http://www.securityfocus.com/brief/888
Wiping your drive only once with garbage data is likely to be sufficient enough security to ensure that prying eyes can't get to your deleted data.
If you have been in the tech/IT industry for any time, you know that you can easily recover files and folders that have been previously deleted from a system with various forensic tools. As long as that block on the hard disk hasn't been completely overwritten by newer data, you have a great chance of getting that data back in some legible format.
When deleting data, some security tools out there will overwrite the blocks occupied by that data numerous times to ensure that the chances of recovery is impossible. While this offers a nice big helping of warm fuzzies, it isn't really necessary!
With the aid of an electron microsope, researchers had determined that while yes, multiple writes and rewrites of random series of 0's and 1's makes it impossible to yield any recoverable data, they also found that a single wipe was sufficient to block any recovery of any substantial amount of meaningful information.
Security Focus is currently investigating this claim, however:
"(Editor's note: SecurityFocus is currently investigating the veracity of the research paper mentioned in this article. Peter Gutmann of the University of Auckland, an expert on secure deletion, has criticized the work in the epilogue to his paper on secure deletion.)"
My guess?
Either way, if you are wiping your disk at least once, it is better than not at all - - also, unless you are harboring some super-secret government data, the amount of effort and resources required to recover data from your drive by some random kid is probably not worth the effort.
Utilities you can use to wipe free space or data from your drive:
- Eraser
- Active @ Killdisk
- Darik's Boot and Nuke
- Shamwow - it can do it all, right? ;)
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