Quote:
Originally posted by FastShark85
I read somewhere that the only way to truly clean a hard drive to eliminate the ability to recover deleted data is to first delete all files, then fill the hard drive to capacity with crap files, re-format and repeat the fill/re-format several times.
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That is true... Because the bit manipulation I talked about earlier is not 100% accurate...
Let's say this is the movement space of the bit:
0---------------x---------------1
(a bit pointing to the left is read as a binary '0' and a bit pointing to the right of the 'x' is read as a binary '1')
Now this is a 0:
0-|-------------x---------------1
And this is a 1:
0---------------x-------------|-1
But If I change the one to a zero and vice versa and I'm not 100% thorough you get this:
the new 1:
0---------------x-------|-------1
the new 0:
0-------|-------x---------------1
You see that there is still an 'influence' of the old values, while they will still be read correctly as 1 and 0.
With sophisticated equipment you can read these influences from a disk and thus recover (or guess) the contents of earlier files.
Popular recommendations are swipe the disk (write all 1's and then all 0's) 7 times for full destroying of sensitive data.
Hope this makes a little sense.. it's getting pretty late for me...