On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 11:21 PM, Doug <doug9345@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thursday, May 22, 2008 08:46, Sandy Harris wrote:
>> This is actually a surprisingly difficult problem, provided you need to
>> consider enemies with serious budgets and equipment. The classic
>> paper is:
>> http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/sec96/full_papers/gu
>>tmann/
> I bought a used hard dry and ...
Sure. Re-formatting or installing an OS might not even overwrite
all the data once.
> If I had sensitive data on a drive that I needed to dispose I'd stuff it into
> the wood furnace ...
That is the only completely certain way. Depending on the data,
I might physically destroy the drive too.
> Short of absolute and total destruction of of the platters in the drive there
> is chance that data can be recovered. ...
Yes, but the problem has been studied in some detail. The reference
I gave suggests 35 overwrites, 8 random and the others with carefully
chosen data ought to do it, based on a detailed analysis of things like
how much data can be extracted by particular types of electron
microscope.
Of course, that was 1996. You'd need to look at more recent papers.
--
Sandy Harris,
Nanjing, China
==============================================
List usage info: http://www.zuikoholic.com
List nannies: olympusadmin@xxxxxxxxxx
==============================================
|