Gail Shaw wrote:
> Your boss is right. It may not be as easy as 'undelete' but the data's there
> and it doesn't take a microscope to find it, and it could be worth a lot of
> money.

It depends how you erased the drive. If you just formatted it, no, the 
data's all still there. If you actually overwrote it, it takes special 
electronics to retrieve it if you can at all.

If you're the DoD, and large numbers of people die when a foreign 
government spends several millions of dollars to recover the data from 
the disk, yes, 21 passes is probably good. That, or scrubbing the drive 
with a belt sander or wire brush and then soaking it in acid until it 
dissolves.

If shredding is good enough for your paper records (vs shred, 
incinerate, stir, then dissolve in acid) then the IFIPS standard is 
probably good enough for your hard drives.

If you're using Windows, simply running
   cipher /w:p:
will overwrite all the spaces on drive p: that don't hold files, first 
with zeros, then with ones, then with random patterns. You can do this 
while the machine is in use. Of course, if you format P: and then do it, 
it'll wipe pretty much everything except (potentially) old file names.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
  Helpful housekeeping hints:
   Check your feather pillows for holes
    before putting them in the washing machine.

Post a reply to this message