2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44
The family of the most popular Windows operating systems is designed in such a way that it does not have built-in means of reliable (final, irreversible) deletion of data from a hard disk.
Simply put, deleting a file and then emptying the trash bin does not actually erase information from the media, and any, even the simplest and most free tool, will allow you to recover all data with almost 100% probability.
How does this threaten the common user? With any act of transferring your hard drive to another person, be it a gift or a sale, you risk that all the private information stored on this drive and prudently "deleted" will be available to the new owner.
Moreover, when using a data recovery tool, this person will be able to find there something that you yourself have already forgotten about, since you deleted some old files a long time ago, and then they will pop up again.
The peculiarities of storing data on hard drives gave rise to a whole science of competently deleting information without the possibility of recovery. Along with this, advanced recovery tools also developed, including for "interesting" situations associated with violation of certain laws by people and organizations. In general, if the scenario goes beyond the usual user situation, then you should not rely on any programs - only complete physical destruction (sledgehammer + acid) will ensure the final disposal of information, and for simple scenarios, specialized software is enough.
We do not think that for such a rarely demanded and specific task, you need to buy some kind of paid product, especially since there are fairly advanced free solutions on the Web that have proven their effectiveness. We'll walk through the process of securely deleting data using the free Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN) tool. Its beauty lies in the availability of several methods of disk cleaning, providing different levels of deletion reliability, as well as in the very way of using it.
DBAN is distributed in the form of an ISO-image, which is enough to burn to any disc, thus creating a bootable disc.
The advantage of this approach is the ability to quickly and efficiently clean up even the system disk of the computer on which the operating system is installed, or help another person by simply coming to him with this disk.
The simplest method of destroying the original file is to completely overwrite it with # FF bytes, that is, a bit mask of eight binary ones (11111111), zeros or any other arbitrary numbers, thereby making it impossible to programmatically restore it using software tools.
Actually, all modern utilities work from this (this may not help from hardware recovery methods).
DBAN interactive mode allows the user to select devices for cleaning. The required disk is selected, after which it is necessary to determine the method by which the cleaning will start (prompts for the command keys at the bottom of the screen).
There are several options, each of them provides a different degree of guarantee of irreversibility of recovery.
One has only to say that a wipe according to the Gutman method is 35 data recording cycles, that is, VERY long. At the same time, experts (and Gutman himself) recognize the redundancy of such a number of cycles for modern disk models, so simpler methods like DoD Short will suffice.
When the disks and methods are selected, press F10. This will start the cleanup procedure, indicating the current stage, recording speed, elapsed time and the remaining time to complete the process.
This method does not work with SSDs and RAID arrays.
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