Multiple passes are necessary because of an unforeseen problem: bad sectors.
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For example, the first pass may fill your hard drive’s binary information with a seemingly endless series of 1s, the second pass will do the same but with a seemingly endless series of 0s and further passes may start filling your had drive with random patterns of 0s and 1s. Each pass or round changes the way the data is written into your hard drive. They work by constantly filling the offending hard drive with random information, again and again since multiple passes are required. Secure drive erasers are very useful, albeit a bit relatively slow. Permanently wiping your information using a hard disk wiper With a bit of luck (or bad luck if you don’t want the information in these files to be recovered) the forensic tool will start recovering erased files in a matter of minutes, and within a few hours, depending on the size of the hard drive, a long list of deleted files and directories will be ready to be accessed again and read.
All the operating system does is just deleting the records pointing to that file in the file system’s index leaving the actual information forgotten in the sectors.īecause of the behavior of the erasing mechanism we’ve previously mentioned the following problem arises: the content of erased files can be recovered pretty easily and quick using forensic tools that ignore what the file system’s index says and will scan all the sectors in the hard drive reconstructing the information as it sees it. This occurs mainly because when you hit delete your operating system assumes these sectors where the file is located are “not important anymore”, so it doesn’t need to preserve that information anymore and will overwrite it only when new files will require that space. This rewriting isn’t instantaneous or even quick, Windows, Linux, OS X, or any other operating system you may use, will rewrite these sectors only when it’s really needed like for example filling your hard drive with new contents. It may come to the surprise of many, but when you delete a file inside your hard disk the file and its contents, ergo de 0s and 1s that represent the information contained in said file, will remain inside your hard disk until the sectors previously occupied by the file are rewritten with a new combination of 0s and 1s. A bit of theoryīut before we talk about these tools we need to talk about how computers “erase” the information inside your hard drives. In this article we will list many of these methods, including some of the leading tools used to forensically wipe your hard drives permanently. (Note: technically it’s not that expensive if you just open your hard disk and destroy the platters with a hammer) If that’s the case we’re happy to inform you that there are several ways to completely and permanently erase your hard drives in a secure and permanent way. However, that’s expensive and you also may want to resell that hard disk so destruction is not an option. That’s why so many companies make sure their sensible data will not fall into the wrong hands by having technicians drill holes into their discarded hard disks and then throwing them inside metal shredders. The only sure way to completely make disappear the contents of a hard drive is to physically destroy it.