Re: Linux FS Question
On Wed, 18 Jun 1997, Christian Hudon wrote:
> On Jun 18, Rick Macdonald wrote
> >
> > Well, you could overwrite the file with gibberish _before_ deleting it.
> > I think that's what Norton does, several times if I remember correctly.
> > That's to comply with US federal regs, which seem a bit superstitious to
> > me! Actually, the giberrish itself is probably some specified bit pattern.
>
> Actually it's not superstition at all. I think you can still recover a file
> that's been overwritten once with zeroes... just open the HD (in a clean
> room, of course) and read off the sectors with a electron microscope (or
I think the older Norton manuals explained the "government wipe" in
greater detail. The one I have now doesn't say how many repeats, only that
a fast wipe of one pass of zeros takes a few seconds on a 1.44MB floppy,
whereas a government wipe takes about two hours. It says the "last
character" used has to be decimal 246. I wonder if there are government
employees who make a living scraping ones and zeros off erased disks...
Anyway, I think the asker of the question got his answer, and I need to
break out a dictionary next time I go to write the word "gibberish"!
...RickM...
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