![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() It’s usually implemented in three or seven passes. It flips every bit on the hard drive to a zero.ĭesigned by the US Department of Defense. There are many more methods than I list here, but these are the ones you’re most likely to see when you use a data shredding program. When I get rid of my computers or hard drives, I use DBAN to completely wipe the drive before sending it away. I do this about once a month just to make sure nothing got by (yes, I do wear tin foil hats too). To wipe your free spaceįile Shredder (linked above) will perform this task, but I prefer to use CCleaner for wiping my free space. What File Shredding Program Should I Use? To destroy sensitive filesĬheck out my tutorial on how to use File Shredder. Hammers, degaussers, and guns do a pretty good job of this. However, if in doubt, you can always destroy the drive that contains your shredded data just to be sure. So unless you’re a high profile target that would be worth expending the immense resources required to maybe get some negligible amount of your data, you will be safe with a normal file shredding program and a 3- to 7-pass algorithm. Only professionals with a lot of time, money, and smarts could conceivably glean anything at all from the shredded data. But it would not be trivial to do and the data recovered would be worthless for any real purpose. Some researchers will argue that it may be possible to partially recover some of the data using magnetic force microscopy. If the data has been erased with a quality algorithm like some of those mentioned below, you will never be able to get your data back.īut there is a more accurate answer if you’re the tinfoil-hat type. The easiest way to do this is by using a program like TrueCrypt to encrypt the entire hard drive. The only way to keep your data completely safe on an SSD is to encrypt it before it’s stored. Not even wiping the entire drive will ensure 100% sanitation. That’s not possible when the drive isn’t overwriting the same location. They work by overwriting the data again and again. You might see where this would be a problem for file shredders. This ensures that the whole drive degrades at the same pace. It will instead put the data wherever is worn out the least. This means that if you overwrite a file, it may not actually put that file in the same location. So to prevent certain parts of the flash drive from wearing out faster than others, SSDs employ “wear-leveling”. It can only be written to so many times before it becomes useless. ![]() The problem is that flash storage wears out extremely quickly compared to magnetic storage. By contrast, SSDs don’t have a disk, rather storing their data on flash memory by capturing an electrical charge in tiny little cells. Traditional magnetic hard drives store data by manipulating tiny physical particles on the surface of a platter (“disk”). So you do it again and again until you can no longer see the original data underneath. And just like erasing the word off a page will leave a trace behind, it’s technically possible that overwriting digital data will too. To use that analogy, it’s more like you’re taking a paper document, erasing all the words, and writing over the top of them with a bunch of nonsensical words. It doesn’t actually get “shredded” in the sense that paper documents do. To shred a file, you run it through a program that overwrites it several times with other data. They may still be there, in whole or in part, just waiting for someone to rediscover them. The longer you use your computer, the better the chance that will happen. It’s possible that your computer has overwritten the deleted files during its normal operation. There’s also professional forensic software that law enforcement and data recovery services use, such as EnCase. Recuva and Puran File Recovery are two such free programs. The computer is now choosing to see that space as “free”, even though there is still data in that location on the hard drive.īecause the actual data is still there, hiding in the free space, it’s possible to recover those files with a special program. It’s not the file that’s deleted, but the pointer that tells your operating system (like Windows) that it exists. When you click the “delete” button and empty the recycle bin, your computer doesn’t actually delete the data. But what does “shredding” mean exactly when you’re talking about digital data? Your files aren’t stored on paper, after all. To make sure your data is gone for good, it needs to be mercilessly destroyed by virtual shredding. 16 Dec, 2013 No Comments Bobby How Security Works ![]()
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