It does not take a mountain of money or a genius TODAY. Many qualified hackers can still decipher the data with more economic tools today. It can be rebuilt!īut just because the Government uses these opposed to the degaussing wand to magnetically wipe the data, doesn't make a better more secure method. You can do a low level wipe with some drive mfgr utilities like Western digital disk manager, which can destroy the sectors and cylinders of the formatting on the disk at the physical level of the hard drive. More iterations are the long wipe (I believe)up to 25 times with Gdisk(Ghost) The switches can do a standard DOD with overwriting the drive 5-7 times with options of 1s 0s or random or selective hard/soft writes. You can do a basic DOD wipe with several commercial types of software from Norton Ghost to Variants of the Unix/Linux drive utilities. DOD wipes have switches that vary the iterations of overwrites and the complexity. The action is done entirely within the drive, and it's more secure thanĪny external data elimination done by writing to the drive. This command is HIGHLY secure, once the command is issued although only the data is destroyed, the drive itself is NOTĭestroyed). Diskĭrives have a 'secure erase' command (aka a 'destroy yourself' command The BEST way to eradicate data on a disk is not DOD approved. Totally impossible (although actually achieving totally impossible is,

Overwrite makes recovery more difficult, more expensive, and closer to [FWIW the long wipe wipes the disk more times with more patterns. Unless there was a very specific, very compelling reason to do so. To at any cost) and not even law enforcement would attempt such recovery Hundreds of hours (in a VERY specialized lab that very few have access

(hundreds of thousands of dollars), the time required goes up into the Non-end-user recovery is still possible, the cost goes up into 6-figures It becomes IMPOSSIBLE at a normal end-user level (no matter whatĮnd-user software tools are used). Once theĭata is overwritten (any simple overwrite, non-DOD at all), retrieving

OTHERWISE (which is almost everyone), ANY actual overwrite of the data Very unusual = you have national security data, terrorist data or If you care about this, you are either doing something VERY unusual, or

Dod hard drive wipe standard