svn commit: r214431 - head/bin/rm

[Alexander Leidinger]

Quoting Garrett Cooper <gcooper at FreeBSD.org> (from Thu, 28 Oct 2010  
14:11:14 -0700):

> Unfortunately it's implied superficially by the 3 pass tort; but as
> most people who understand magnetic disks know, unless you completely
> obliterate a disk, wipe over it with random data enough times,
> whatever, the content is still on the disk and retrievable via various
> methods...

Can you please elaborate?

I've read somewhere that someone (some kind of computer magazine) made  
a test of this (yes, to much somewhere and someone, sorry). They took  
a full harddisk with random data (random as in pictures, music, ...)  
and overwrote it once with zeros and gave it to one (or several) data  
rescue companies. The result was that for a price which makes still  
sense to pay for a business (like a bank), only a fraction of data (as  
in non-zero bytes) was recoverable, and that none of the original  
files, and no useful sequence of data, was recovered.

For myself I kept the info that I've did not read it at an untrusty  
place and that for any normal person (even with some malicious intent  
to remove traces of the existence of something) overwritting a  
harddisk one time completely is enough.

Bye,
Alexander.

-- 
Christ died for our sins, so let's not disappoint Him.

http://www.Leidinger.net    Alexander @ Leidinger.net: PGP ID = B0063FE7
http://www.FreeBSD.org       netchild @ FreeBSD.org  : PGP ID = 72077137