Is there a "wipedisk" product that will only wipe "erased" files?
I only want to "wipe" old tax data and old medical records from this PC.
...Jim Thompson
-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at
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| 1962 | I love to cook with wine Sometimes I even put it in the food
I know of several that allow you to toss files into a "shredder" that does a wipe of the file during deletion, but I don't know of any that will purge old data. Maybe undelete them and then shred them?
Ah, found one that says it will go over unused disk space and wipe it too, and it is free.
"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...
Jim,
I've used a program that scrambles all unused sectors on a hard drive for that specific purpose. In fact, as I recall, this one would do multiple passes to insure that there are no traces (partially flipped dipoles?) of the old data. However, I can't recall its name.
Bob
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-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at
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| 1962 | Obama clearly blames insurance companies for his mother's death from cancer. One then has to wonder if this whole health bill isn't a personal vendetta against private insurance companies?
Doesn't defrag have a clear unused space option? - the space occupied by an erased file being marked as unused should then be cleared.
Another option is create a short term folder and fill it up with any old CDs/DVDs found laying about until the remaining capacity is filled, then delete the short term folder.
That way any attempt to recover deleted files only gets a bunch of old DVDs.
If that option is there, I have never noticed it. Anyway, I have used Diskeeper automatic defrag for years, it uses free system time to defrag in the back ground continuously. I'm sure that makes a mess of any left over file data over time, but I wouldn't bet the house on it. The filling up unused space with data is pretty much what fileshredder is doing to the disk when it scrubs the disk. From what I read, it just fills up all the unused disk space with random data. You accomplish the same thing without spending hours ripping DVDs.
What bugs me is what do to with a new drive that fails under warranty. If you send it in for repair, you are sending your data off to some anonymous guy in a repair center. The only really secure option is to bite the bullet and physically destroy a new drive. If you don't think that happens all that often, just google "Seagate 1TB drive failures". I have two high end work stations running 4TB striped/mirrored RAID arrays, and 2 new backup blank drives for swapping. Of those 12 1TB drives 10 of them died within 3 months. What do you do? Send off chunks of confidential customer and in house information to the repair center or destroy the drive?
Once it has confidential info on it, I NEVER willingly allow a hard drive to leave my control. Period. I still have at least one 40M drive in locked storage (that's 40M, not 40G!).
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| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine Sometimes I even put it in the food
Yep, me too. I would rather take the loss on the drives than take a bigger loss down the road. I basically threw $3K down the drain, rather than let those drives out of my control. Now the suckers are less than a hundred bucks a pop. I just started a program of swapping them as I could, or when they failed. Fortunately, I never had two go at the same time, or I would have had to break out the backups.
Every f'in one of them. All bought at the same time, all died within 3 months.
1TB Barracuda Interal Drives. From what I read, firmware issues, so the data is still there. Even more of a reason to NOT let them go. I didn't lose any data, I am a stickler for backing up and I never had more than one drive fail on a stripe at once, so I swapped the drives as they failed and the array rebuilt on the fly.
Somebody (Dell?) offers an additional-cost option where you can get warranty service without returning the HDD. Don't know how they work it, whether it's honor system or they require you to somehow disable the old HDD in some verifiable manner.
Nice, that's why we bust them up and sometimes give them a dip in the big solder pot to boot. We send the pieces off to a metal recovery plant that grinds it all up and recovers the various metals.
That's cool, but I guess there is a price when you build up a bleeding edge system from scratch. 6 months later the parts are 1/3 the cost and more stable.
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