Giles Orr via talk wrote on 2024-03-23 07:50:
I have, for many years, used "Darik's Boot and Nuke" on a USB stick to
securely wipe spinning hard disks. It takes a long time, but I mostly
understand and trust the process.
I'm going to take a contrarian stance and suggest that the best way is
to run a pass or two of `dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/$disk ...` then just
sell or donate the otherwise usable device.
Our data is valuable, but not *that* valuable.
Anyone coming into possession of a new device is going to think "new
storage!" not "if I can pull a few bits of data from this device, I can
destroy someone's life and finances".
They'll plug it in to a computer, it won't be readable at all since it's
not NTFS, and they'll format it NTFS and store their data on it.
The NSA, etc. isn't out to get us (through forensic data recovery on
discarded devices).
https://xkcd.com/538/
Also, reduce e-waste and support those that are in dire financial
straights. Pre-format it with NTFS, download https://gtalug.org onto the
drive, donate it to someone who'll use it and be thankful for the
opportunity.
rb
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