Talk:Secure deletion

'The Secure Way' not needed
You don't have to overwrite the disk with random data and you don't have to do it multiple times; this is a waste of time and paranoid nonsense from the past. Search scholar.google.com for "Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy" from Craig Wright, Dave Kleiman, and Shyaam Sundhar R.S. for proof. Overwriting the data once with zeros is efficient enough to destroy the data for forensics using an electron microscope.


 * Yes, and the article does nowhere claim otherwise. Still, The Secure Way is there for a very practical reason (as explained in the first sentence of that section) - it's useful to have random looking data on to be encrypted devices. Same thing goes for The Useful Way - much slower, but there for a practical reason (testing disk for errors). If you're not interested in either of those, just stick to The Fastest Way. All three methods delete the entire disk with by overwriting it once. Also, The Great Wiping Controversy (related blog post) is already linked at the bottom of the article. AndreasKlauer 18:37, 17 July 2010 (GMT)

Pointers to where to go from here?
Should a "where to go from here" section be added at the end of this page? It could contain links to DM-Crypt or the Gentoo Handbook (Preparing the Disks).

Someone added "After this, you need to create a new filesystem to /dev/sdx using mkfs..." and a link to Gentoo Handbook, I undid this change because it was added in a place where it didn't fit at all. Also I assume that whoever deletes his entire hard disk already knows what he's planning to do with it afterwards (for example set up DM-Crypt on it).

AndreasKlauer 10:19, 23 December 2009 (GMT)