If your doing on behalf of a company to keep their documents, customer database, bank details, and/or source code safe, then it's well worth the time for the boss to be paying you to do that. What I said is completely free advice, they can do it or not, entirely up to them. Justifying billed hours wiping drives 7 times for no reason. I also happen to be an IT Security Expert now. I might or might not of been that smart kid mentioned. Those will be slow to perform, but more secure. If using Avast Shred, set it to 'DOD (Department of Defense)' or even better 'Gutmann method'. Just avoid considering cracked / illegal versions of them as some likely contain a backdoor uploading your personal files before removing them. Free versions might only do a single pass wipe (again just an illusion of removal, but not actually secure). Just understand these security tools are something you buy. Which is what 'BCWipe' from Jetico can do, for commercial purchase.Įlse you would be looking at something like 'Blancco Drive Erasure'. DoD 5220.22-M(ECE) - 7 passes, ideal for personal usage on HDD (hard disk drives). At least 7, which is considered a government wipe.įind something which supports 'DoD 5220.22-M Wipe Method' (originally used by the Goverment, but no longer 100% secure if using SSD) or better, such as 'NIST 800-88 Clear' and 'NIST 800 88 Purge' (if you seriously want government security on Solid State Drives).

You need to remove the file(s), overwrite with new data, then remove and repeat multiple times. Unless that file has been overwritten multiple times already, you can recover it with a click of a button. For example: 'Recuva' from CCleaner offers file recovery from that. Deleting a file or merely formatting a drive is also recoverable. For example: 'EaseUS Partition Master' provides Partition Recovery Wizard to help you recover deleted or lost partitions with ease. Deleting a partition is still recoverable. Just because that guy does, doesn't mean you have to. This doesn't have the limitations of FAT32, plus performance is faster. DONT use FAT32, use NTFS (which it probably already is).

To avoid confusion for the topic owner and to get back on topic.

Dod 7 pass wipe