Re: techie advice needed
Posted: Sun Nov 30, 2003 8:33 am
jeez ur banking details or whatever (which are just gonna be word, excell docs or something) must be making u paranoid, ur starting to sound a lil suspicious :O
The company I work for (which shall remain nameless!!) does 80% of our business with large corporates like banks and multinationals and government agencies including the MOD - a lot of the time we take responsibility for disposal of old kit which sometimes is dumped and othertimes sold on.
As woodgnome says the only way to be 100% sure is to destroy the drive but failing that the industry accepted way is to overwrite the drive a number of times (currently we do it 6 time) therefore making it impossible to retrieve old data from the original contents of the drive.
Formatting the drive is useless and as is just deleting files mainly because all windows does it to remove the pointer to the file and the space the file was in is then marked as available but the actual file will stay there until it is overwritten which could be 10 seconds but equally could be 6 months - even once its been overwritten it is possible technically to retrieve parts of the data as usually blocks of a file are written in loads of different places on the disk but once it has been overwritten a number of times it becomes night on impossible to retrieve - this is how undelete programs are able to work but also explains why they lose effectiveness as time passes after you have deleted the file as it is more likely to be overwritten as each minute passes.
Jason