Computer help forum: Securely deleting data

That's a good point about passwords (etc) but how come the office files weren't wiped?

As Darth Sidious said " Wipe them out, all of them. "

Your restore didn't do a total wipe. Some restore to factory don't so unless you wipe the drive and use restore media, you're never quite sure.

Bob

Sorry,

I knew that there was a risk that the restore would not wipe all "deleted" files but I thought that using file shredder would deal with them? Isn't that its role?

You are repeating prior findings that such shredders and some restores do not result in a clean machine.

What's the risk?
Bob

just stuff I have built up over years I suppose. Yes in a perfect world I could have used file shredder's secure delete but from what I am learning here I'm beggining to wonder if there is a way to get rid of sensitive files (short of Willy's suggestion of nuking the drive).

Even with those shredders, a good forensics team can explore what is called slack space. Today's HDD's use 4KB sectors and if you wrote a 1K file, what's in that 3K slack area?

Sorry but while you did clean it up, it's not perfect. Good cleaning but imperfect.

How perfectly clean must it be?
Bob

I hadn't considered the possability of only part of the sector being wiped I presumed (another mistake) that the shredder, when writing to a sector, would would overwrite all of the sector.

I think in future, unless I'm totally confident who is getting the drive it will be a hammer to drive job.

Thank you for pointing out the failings of these shredders.

I use DBAN and I'm done for the drive wipe. Then I can use the restore media and frankly? Short of the NSA and its multibillion dollar labs, no one is getting that data back.

No need to smash a good drive in my opinion.
Bob

You have the recovery discs and trust they'll work, then OK let's really clean that laptop.

Google for either KILLDISK or DBAN, find the .ISO file and burn to a disc. Reboot with the burnt disc and follow the prompts to really wipe out the old data, etc.. Once done, then do an OS re-install but also a proper reformat during that install and it should reload back to day 1. HOWEVER, if your recovery discs were made some time after you had the laptop, you may have created a " dated image" of that laptop so you can return to it as in restore to that date. You state you have recovery disc(s), basically how were these made, if not factory supplied. It's important to note that those recovery discs if user made need to be reliable so you can retrun to a working laptop, otherwise a real wipe out will totally make it secure until a proper OS reload is done. Details, details they matter.

BTW, doesn't Recuva rescue or do repair of files, if so you may have unshred files, it may have repaired them. Just a WAG on that, but recheck use setting.

tada -----Willy