[Gllug] Thoughts on secondhand server guide price

[Jose Luis Martinez]

On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 7:01 AM, John Hearns<hearnsj at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Chaps and Chapesses,
>   please stop giving out advice which you haven't put into practice
> yourselves.
>
> I had occasion recently to securely delete a hard drive formatted with Linux
> filesystems, and
> did a little bit of research on this.
>
> You should use the 'scrub' tool to do this:
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/diskscrub
>
> or as someone suggests 'wipe' http://wipe.sourceforge.net/
>
> If you Google there will be bootable CD/USB distros which do this.
>

You have to be specific about which advice you find questionable and
why, otherwise we are none the wiser.

In the immense majority of cases just overwriting with something else
is more than adequate (and as actually the original poster himself
pointed out, he actually does not really care about what is there, so
on occasions doing nothing is also fine).

If you need to do something "securely" (define securely)  then It is a
matter of deciding at what point any method you use is secure enough.
If you justifiably need to be paranoid about wiping out your disk you
should not waste time with software, your disk should be destroyed
physically, whatever residual cost a 2nd hand disk may have surely it
is not worth whatever damage could be inflicted on an individual or
organization which is worried about the disk's contents.

I also would be interested to know if anybody can cite specific
examples of disks from which data has been  recovered once they have
been overwritten.
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