File shredder?

Not so. There still exists the possibility of recovery from the
surrounding magnetic domains. Which is why people like the US
Government crush and burn their old hard drive platters.

Phil

 

0On Mon, 24 Oct 2005 11:14:50 +0100, Phil Launchbury

It appears, you still don't know how Eraser works,

 

Seemingly so. I stand corrected.

 

I do. But repeated writes to a track will not remove the older magnetic
domain information in the track sidebands.

Which is why most Government agencies (especially ones conscious about
security) will have their old hard drives crushed and incinerated.

Phil

 

Why not? A write put the information there in the first place. I would have
thought repeated writes of different bit patterns will erase any intertrack
info.

 

If the information has been on the drive a long time you get leakage
into the surrounding magnetic domains. If you then do erase wipes on
the drive it only will affect the area that the read/write head covers
and not the intertrack domains.

Of course over time that new info will eventually leak out into the
intertrack domains too.. but in the meantime you can recover some of
the info by reading the intertrack areas.

Phil

 

PUt some loud music on to an old cassette tape, record over it and you
might still be able to hear some of the loud music that you've just
wiped over.

Write on the tape loads and loads of times and you'll notice that it
sounds noisy in general. That's because the old data hasn't been
completely overwritten.

 

Mups wrote

Look laddy, a lot of people have made a lot of money out of the security
business over the years and they would like it to continue, let's not
rock the boat shall we.