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The Importance Of Securely Deleting Data
By Rodney Sellers
Expert Author
Article Date: 2009-12-15
I have worked for some companies the care greatly about deleting data certain ways and others that do not seem to care if you delete data or not. If your company deals with sensitive data that you don't want anyone else to see, you may want to look into a way to securely delete your data.
At the end of a computer's life cycle, most companies do not think about the data that is on the hard drive when they recycle or donate a computer. This data can be very easily recovered and viewed unless steps are taken. The easiest way I have found is by using the Secure-Delete tools.
Once you install the Secure-Delete tools, you'll have access to 4 new command line arguments.
srm: used for deleting files.
Smem: used for wiping your computers memory.
Sfill: Used to wipe the free space on your hard drive.
Sswap: used to wipe your swap file.
I will focus on srm and sfill. They are the most useful tools I have found.
sfill is designed to delete data which lies on available diskspace on mediums in a secure manner which can not be recovered by thiefs, law enforcement or other threats. The wipe algorythm is based on the paper "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory" pre-sented at the 6th Usenix Security Symposium by Peter Gutmann, one of the leading civilian cryptographers. This tool is very useful when you are going to recycle or donate a computer. This will write over the drive with data 38 times so no data can be recovered.
srm is designed to delete data on mediums in a secure manner which can
not be recovered by thiefs, law enforcement or other threats. The wipe algorythm is based on the paper "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory" presented at the 6th Usenix Security Symposium by Peter Gutmann, one of the leading civilian cryptographers. This tool is very useful if you just want to delete a file on your computer. Like sfill will write over the data 38 times to make sure it is not recoverable. If you are running RAID, then it will take a long time to delete a file because there is so much redundancy.
About the Author:
Rodney Is A Staff Writter for iEntry.
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