Wiping Data (Was: Re:OT: Disposing Old Computer Parts)

[Ian Petersen]

On 6/6/07, Madison Kelly <linux-5ZoueyuiTZhBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> $ man shred
>
> Does a wonderful job, and lets you be as paranoid as you want!

There's also DBAN (Darik's Boot and Nuke) at http://dban.sf.net.  It's
a bootable CD/DVD/floppy/USB key that irrevocably erases a machine
with configurable levels of paranoia.

Another possible solution, for future machines, is to encrypt the
disk.  Then, when you dispose of the machine, the contents of the disk
are already scrambled--just make sure you pick strong passwords, and
so on.  I've seen a number of articles in various Linux magazines
recently that talk about how to do this.  You can either store the
boot partition on a USB key to encrypt the _entire_ hard disk, or, if
you're slightly less paranoid, you can leave an unencrypted boot
partition on the drive, and then wipe that when you dispose of the
machine.

Ian

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