Gutmann Method on Empty Space

[RW]

On Fri, 18 Jan 2008 23:38:27 -0800
"Jason C. Wells" <jcw at highperformance.net> wrote:


> It's interesting to note that Gutmann's earlier work said, loosely
> "If you do this, you should be fairly certain you data is
> unrecoverable." He now says, "A few passes of random data is as good
> as can be expected."  Those two standards of performance are very
> different.  

But he goes on to say:

"Looking at this from the other point of view, with the ever-increasing
data density on disk platters and a corresponding reduction in feature
size and use of exotic techniques to record data on the medium, it's
unlikely that anything can be recovered from any recent drive except
perhaps a single level via basic error-cancelling techniques." 

So even those few passes of random data are overkill.

>          I just want to make sure that any given day that the police
> come take my functioning computers way that nothing can be recovered
> that I explicitly deleted.  

The police just take disk images.