Penned by Ted Unangst on 20120725 11:14.05, we have: | On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 17:38, Paul de Weerd wrote: | > Please read | > | > http://www.vidarholen.net/~vidar/overwriting_hard_drive_data.pdf | > | > I think it's time to stop propagating the Guttman lies. Overwriting | > more than once does not help. | | In fairness to Guttman, he's not the liar. The paper, linked below, | is still an interesting read. But as he notes in the epilogue, "In | the time since this paper was published, some people have treated the | 35-pass overwrite technique described in it more as a kind of voodoo | incantation to banish evil spirits than the result of a technical | analysis of drive encoding techniques. As a result, they advocate | applying the voodoo to PRML and EPRML drives even though it will have | no more effect than a simple scrubbing with random data. In fact | performing the full 35-pass overwrite is pointless for any drive since | it targets a blend of scenarios involving all types of (normally-used) | encoding technology, which covers everything back to 30+-year-old MFM | methods (if you don't understand that statement, re-read the paper)." | | http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html | | [I think naddy's suggestion to use arc4random is reasonable will | update for that soon.]
Thanks for the cluebats, I'll know better in the future. Based on Paul's pdf link above, it seems like a single pass with arc4random is sufficient... Thanks, -- Todd Fries .. t...@fries.net _____________________________________________ | \ 1.636.410.0632 (voice) | Free Daemon Consulting, LLC \ 1.405.227.9094 (voice) | http://FreeDaemonConsulting.com \ 1.866.792.3418 (FAX) | 2525 NW Expy #525, Oklahoma City, OK 73112 \ sip:freedae...@ekiga.net | "..in support of free software solutions." \ sip:4052279...@ekiga.net \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 37E7 D3EB 74D0 8D66 A68D B866 0326 204E 3F42 004A http://todd.fries.net/pgp.txt
