Comments on How to safely wipe your data with Dariks Boot and Nuke bootable live CD
Sometimes, we need to completely and irreversibly wipe all data contained in a disk to keep them from falling into the wrong hands. This may not be something we are doing on a day to day basis, but if you want to do it, you should do it right and ensure that the data cannot be recovered by experts. One of the many ways of doing this is through Darik's Boot and Nuke bootable live CD. This tool is made from the same team that develops the professional-grade Blancco data eraser, only it is available for free and without guarantee or support. The reason I like DBaN is because it is very simple to use and does the job fast.
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Comments
It has been proven (repeatedly) that reading from a disk that has been zero'd (correctly) will yield absolute garbage.
No special utilites required, just dd
dd if=/dev/zero of=/DEVICE/PARTITION
In the end the level of secure wiping comes down to the value of the data on the drive, and the value of the time someone would spend retrieving it. If your disk has the usual photos and banking information from a home computer, and someone randomly picks it up, it's not going to be worth using something like a "magnetic force microscope" as mentioned above, because the disk has an unknown and likely limited avlue. Simpler and cheaper to try the next disk to see if it's easier pickings. So a PRNG or DODshort is likely enough.
However, if you are dealing with a disk likely to contain bank records or confidential/DOD information, that's when the higher-end wipes come into play. At this point the disk has a high likelyhood of value, and therefore more effort/expense would be put into retrieving wiped information. Your regular business records are not necessarily this high-value, but doing a full DOD wipe is at least *part* of a "CYA" practice to show you made best efforts to protect customer data.
Is this recommended for use with SSD drives? I heard that it could shorten the usable life of the SSD drive using this.