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Re: 'Shredding' a hard disk



On Thu, 2002-06-13 at 13:54, Ivo Wever wrote:
> >But, for all practical values, a simple `dd if=dev/urandom bs=1M \
> >  of=/dev/hdX` should be quite sufficient.
> Some people advise to repeat this procedure several times. Can anyone
> explain why? I see no reason why one pass doesn't suffice.

Data can be recovered from a disk by looking at the levels of magnetic
charge on the disk.  Data on the disk is binary but of course the actual
charges are not just two levels, but a range of values.  These values
can betray what the original data was, and how long ago it was changed.
I remember reading about a data recovery team that recovered files after
the data had supposedly been removed with a 'dd' command like above.

Ross
-- 
Ross Burton                                 mail: ross@burtonini.com
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