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Physical destruction of a drive is tricky business. There are many companies that deal specifically in the field of data destruction, so if you are doing any kind of mass you may want to at least look at their price list. If you contract, make sure the company is properly bonded/insured, and provides audit trails for each destroyed item. In the worst case ...

Best stop doing that. Never overwrite an SSD/flash storage device completely in order to erase it, except as a last resort. NVRAM has a limited amount of write cycles available. At some point, after enough writes to an NVRAM cell, it will completely stop working. For modern versions, we're in the ballpark of an estimated lifespan of 3,000 write cycles. ...

The proper answer for this question is very situational, and dependent upon the policies and procedures in place at your company. Many companies have in place methods of backing up portions of the drive meant for user data, or even the entire drive, across the corporate network. If they've performed such backups on your system, there's nothing you can do ...

The worst thing you can do is tearing them apart. It's time consuming and attacker just needs extra time and patience to put pieces together. The same rule applies for shredding - if after shredding are left too large pieces, again, attacker just needs time and patience. There are several shredding techincs (from wikipedia) Strip-cut shredders, ...

Modern research seems to indicate that performing a single zero-pass of a hard drive is sufficient for most data dispositions. In which case, no, performing a file or partition encryption would not be faster. Except in the case of hardware accelerated encryption (such as the newer Intel i series processors) encryption speed is CPU bound, whereas a single ...

The only NIST approved method to securely erase a hard drive is by utilizing the secure erase internal command - documented at the Center for Magnetic Recording Research (CMRR) - and that is what everyone should be doing. It is an ATA command, and covers (S)ATA interfaces. After that, you can optionally degauss the drive to erase the firmware itself. Lots ...

I've had a look and I think this question provides some interesting options. I'll summarise them here: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdaX copies zeros over your whole disk. rm -rf --no-preserve-root / recursively deletes all files on a disk, overriding the rm -rf / warning on systems where that is enabled. If you can get to a box via ssh, running the dd variant ...

You've described the principles behind a live CD boot. This can be most strongly ensured by having no permanent media within the machine. I'm going to gear my answer towards Linux as that's what I'm most familiar with in this context. Having a hard drive with all disk partitions mounted as read-only and all read-write partitions mounted in memory would also ...

Burning is a cheap and effective way to get rid of this data. Included are some links to some burning standards: US Army Data Destuction (Check out Section V) http://www.apd.army.mil/pdffiles/r380_5.pdf (Search for "burn") http://kdla.ky.gov/records/Documents/Destruction%20Guidelines.PDF One of the biggest issues with burning is that you end up with ...

From a theoretical standpoint the idea of total drive destruction may be the only way of destroying data on a hard drive fully. From a practical standpoint, I've not seen any evidence that it's possible to recover meaningful data from a standard hard drive (ie, not taking SSDs or other devices that use wear levelling or similar technologies) after a once ...

We use 3 primary methods of media destruction. Which method that is chosen will, of course, depend on any number of factors including; corporate policies regarding data handling, legal or regulatory requirements, corporate policies regarding equipment refresh/retirement, time constraints, physical condition of the device, etc. Secure Deletion This would ...

It looks like you are already aware of the 1st part of this question. For most purposes any non-volatile storage which may have held he data you consider sensitive should be included (solid state drives, hard drives, EPROMS, USB keys etc) but volatile memory should not. These storage devices could be in printers, fax machines, routers, switches, any ...

I think that while @Scott is absolutely right - these days, unless you need a multi-pass for regulatory reasons wiping data is fast - the much simpler solution is to have the entire drive encrypted using a strong passphrase, then lose the passphrase when you need to destroy the data. Your risk will be around someone having a copy of that passphrase. Other ...

Do you need to erase the data, or do you need to persuade other people that the data has been erased? (I will only talk about 'entire disk' wiping; I'm not talking about wiping single files or slack space.) As far as I am aware there is no software package that claims to be able to recover data that has had a single overwrite. There are no companies that ...

SSD's and Flash drives are an interesting problem... As @Bell pointed out as a response to this question: Yes, the effectiveness of the shredding operation is dependent on a fixed or physical mapping between a block number and piece of non-volatile storage. This works for spinning media but not for SSDs which virtaulise their blocks for performance ...

I'll put my proper IT hat on - still just about fits - and suggest you could try asking your IT team what their process is - the answer might reassure you. Typically, IT are going to make a "just-in-case" backup of your drive and put it on a shelf ("just-in-case" management realises a year after you've gone that you had a file on your drive that is ...

1) With modern filesystems, there is no more concept of securely deleting an individual file. It might have been copied around, snapshotted, written to a different location upon editing, etc. 2) With modern drives, there is no deletion / wipe without confirming it. Some drives have had a Secure Wipe command flat-out lies to you, returning immediately while ...

Just chiming it to point that "unshredding" is not purely theoretical. It was done on a large scale with East German archives when the Iron Curtain fell, in order to determine (among other things) who was snitching on who. More on the subject in Wired : http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/16-02/ff_stasi?currentPage=all Data destruction is ...

There is a good list of options here PC Pro’s top 10 hard disk destruction methods you've got quite a lot of options depending on how extreme you want to be and what tools you have access to. Personally I unscrew the HDDs take out the platters and then use them for coffee coasters if they haven't got anything massively sensitive on them.

Your hard drive will undoubtedly contain toxic substances which if heated or burned will be released into the air, not a good thing. If you did this in your oven you would never want to use your oven for food again! Much better to take the entire drive as is and simply chop it into many pieces. A sheet metal shear should be able to slice through it like ...

Considering the amount of stuff you're mentioning, I would wipe out the drive entirely. You can run some software to fill the drive with garbage a couple of times. Better still, take the drive with you, or burn it up :) Edit: I think swapping their drive with a new one is entirely reasonable, at a reasonable cost too. Depends on company policies, most ...

If it is a working hard drive, I would use either ATA Secure Erase or DBAN to erase all data on it. (If it is a SSD, use ATA Secure Erase.) Assuming either of those is successful, I wouldn't bother with physical destruction. Physical destruction comes into play if the hard drive is no longer working and it is impossible to erase the data using ATA Secure ...

There are facilities that provide this service. The facilities are often contracted in for facility-wide "shred-days." In house, the military has Defense Re-utilization and Marketing Office (DRMO.) This office attempts to re-sell, or re-utilize equipment safe for use, or is often used in disposition. Here's what Ive found: Pulverizing: Basically, this is ...

If you use sdelete from Microsoft (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897443.aspx) you don't have to install anything. It has an option to fill the unused disk space with zeroes too. If you already deleted the files this is what I'd just to make sure that nothing remains of the original file.

This is a posible duplicate of a question How can I reliably erase all information on a hard drive? That dealt with working drives, I guess. But the answer depends on how sensitive is the information how serious are the attackers do you need to follow a protocol do you need to persuade other people the data has gone For information that's not very ...

Taking care of your personal privacy concerns without messing your company's IT staff around unnecessarily is best accomplished at a file or folder level. Replacing the physical drive is looking for warranty trouble, if your overwrite the contents of the entire drive you'll take the recovery partition with you. Even just scrubbing the system drive means ...

As storage technologies change over time, using different encodings and remappings to deal with sector errors, the best way to permanently erase data changes also. Very smart people have expended enormous amounts of time and effort arguing over this problem. Most of them end up at the same bottom line, which is: the only method you can truly trust is ...

Burn it. If you shred it first, it'll catch fire more easily. I think there's no regulation about burning private papers in your country / city, so you can simple take all the daily paper and burn it. And be sure to burn eveything. After the fire is gone, take a good look at the ashes, and burn again everything that wasn't well burnt before.

HIPAA regulations, as far as I can tell, do not specifically address the destruction of individual electronic files. Under HIPAA, you have an obligation to ensure that PHI does not fall into the wrong hands. You can best accomplish this by protecting systems and networks, not individual files.