Travel Technology - Deleted but Not Gone

Deleted but Not Gone

Maintaining privacy in the era of digital information requires work on a number of fronts, whether fending off spyware, protecting important files with encryption or configuring a Wi-Fi hot spot to keep interlopers off a wireless network.

One basic privacy measure, however, is easily overlooked: proper data destruction.

Deleting confidential data completely is essential when donating or selling old computers, and it can also help maintain privacy on computers that may end up lost or stolen. And for businesses looking for ways to comply with the security requirements of laws like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a sound policy on data control and destruction is crucial.

When normal deletion methods like the Recycle Bin or the delete command are used, the computer's operating system, for the sake of speed, creates an illusion that data has been deleted. In fact, it merely earmarks that region of a disk or drive as being available for new data to overwrite the old data. Until that overwriting occurs, the old data can be retrieved with undelete programs and tools used by data recovery labs and law enforcement agencies.

There are, however, several options for securely eliminating data from hard disks, U.S.B. flash drives and other storage media. These programs overwrite data with meaningless characters to render it unrecoverable with today's data recovery techniques...

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/03/technology/circuits/03basics.html

Good article.
And of course, one way to ensure that data on a hard disk will never be recovered is to destroy the disk. You can do that by removing the disk's platters and grinding them to bits - an extreme option, but effective.
I think stepping on them a couple of times with hiking boots would suffice.

Good article.

I think stepping on them a couple of times with hiking boots would suffice.

That, and whatever happened to just flushing stuff down the toilet? :)

"Overwriting" or "double-overwriting" indeed makes it much harder for someone to recover erased data but still doesn't fully guarantee it. There are always non-negligible chances that some third party discovers the (pseudo)random process by which the program overwrites your data.

Considering the comparative cost of buying one of these programs as opposed to buying a brand new HDD, one could just physically destroy the HDD. When you claim that you have sooo valuable/sensitive info, I don't think $89.90+TAX is such a big deal.

Try eraser (http://www.sourceforge.net/eraser). Also, the PGP desktop suite comes with a secure trash can as well.