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[Colin J. Raven]

On Jan 20 at 14:55, Erik Norgaard launched this into the bitstream:

> Colin J. Raven wrote:
>
>> Eh? Surely you don't meant trashed - physically annihilated?
>> Phew! I believe in radical solutions certainly, but..umm..isn't that going 
>> just a little bit too far? :-)
>> I'm assuming you mean destructively formatted...
>
> You always have to classify the data and take appropriate measures, as well 
> as consider the costs of various methods of data destruction.
>
> It may actually be cheaper to melt the disks and by new ones rather than
> do a destructive format. Remember, if you have no trust relation with the 
> ones who receive the pc's then the trusted employee will most likely be one 
> from your organization and high paid.
>
> It has happened that companies have shipped of a load of used pc's for
> reuse in poor countries and then sensitive data has reappeared where it
> shouldn't, causing more than just embarasment to the original owner.
>
> If a harddisk contains sensitive information such as personal infor-
> mation, information about your security infrastructure (passwords), or other, 
> then I would prefer a complete meltdown of the disk and recycle it as scrap 
> metal.

I always thought that formatting/fdisk'ing twice completely erased 
*permanently* whatever had been on the disc. You make an interesting 
case that previously I never thought about in any detail.

Thanks for real info from the field, it's definitely food for thought!

Regards,
-Colin
--
Colin J. Raven
FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE - http://www.FreeBSD.org - There can be only One
Thu Jan 20 14:59:00 CET 2005
  2:59PM  up  3:49, 2 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00