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Study: 78% of Resold Drives Still Contain Readable Personal or Business Data (consumerist.com)
itwbennett writes: Blancco Technology Group, which specializes in data erasure, bought 200 secondhand PC storage drives (PDF) from eBay and Craigslist to see if they could recover any of the old data saved inside. Their findings: 78 percent of the drives contained residual data that could be recovered, 67 percent still held personal files, such as photos with location indicators, resumes and financial data, and 11 percent of the drives also contained company data, such as emails, spreadsheets and customer information. Only 10 percent had all the data securely wiped, Blancco said. The Consumerist points out that Blancco makes their money from promising secure data erasure, so the company has a "strong and vested interest in these results." As for why so many of the drives contain unwanted information, the report says it has to do with the difference between "deleting" data and "erasing" data. Your files aren't actually deleted when you drag them to the Trash or Recycle Bin, or by using the delete key -- shocking, I know. You can format a drive to erase the data, but you have to be careful of the format commands being used. A quick format, which was used on 40% of the drives in the sample, still leaves some residual data on the drive for someone to possibly access. A full format, which was used on 14% of the drives, will do a better job in removing unwanted files, but it too may still miss some crucial information. The solution Blancco recommends: buy a tool to perform complete data erasure.
Delete the block containing the keys.
For this threat model, this is the perfect answer (if you trust the encryption, that is).
No need for some "secure erase" snake oil.
You know the cheapest and most secure way to delete your data is to hit the disk a few times with a slegehammer. It's also a great tension reliever. Of course, after you have had a smashing good time please dispose of the part(s) in a responsible manner. :-)
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
> You know the cheapest and most secure way to delete your data is to hit the disk a few times with a slegehammer.
I find that don't make as much on ebay once I've done that.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
If you're decommissioning an online disk, the simplest solution would be to boot one of the live-distro Linuxes and run dd on it.
Or you could just let Windows update itself to Win10 and then try to rollback to Win7, by all accounts that's just as effective at deleting your data.