On Sat, 2019-01-26 at 11:04 -0800, Samuel Sieb wrote:
On 1/26/19 2:47 AM, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
On Fri, 2019-01-25 at 22:43 -0800, ToddAndMargo via users wrote:
On 1/25/19 9:38 PM, fred roller wrote:
You can wipe your drive with:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/[device to be wiped]
/dev/zero is the fastest I have found.
All that does is set every bit to 0. Since magnetic domains have hysteresis, suitable equipment can recover the previous state at a physical level. That's why proper trashing takes several passes.
Sure, but do you expect someone to find your hard drive and put that much money and effort into extracting your data? For most people, it's just that you don't want some random person finding your hard drive in a second hand store and checking out your files.
I don't "expect" anything, but without knowing the OP's use-case, none of us can say what's cost-effective. I merely pointed out that a single pass with /dev/zero is not proof against even commercial-grade recovery, let alone military grade.
poc