Comment Naive though it may sound, Zeroing it? (Score 1) 1016
A while back I remember a challenge being put out to any company specializing in drive forensics to recover ANY data from a drive that had been wiped using a simple dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda or what not. Something in the order of a million dollars or some other huge(ish) prize.
I also remember that there ended up being no takers for what would have in theory been a free meal if we're to believe the prevalent hooplah around drive forensics. Given how widely publicized the challenge was it was taken as many in the know as a sign that despite what the science behind the magnetic data on the platters says, once wiped to zeroes it becomes either impractical or impossible to reliably recover the actual data that was once stored there.
Again, this is just conjecture based on partially-informed observation, and incomplete recollection of that event. I didn't track it enough to know if there ended up being takers after all, how they fared, etc. I do remember it being publicized here on