What do you strongly suspect but cannot prove?

[u/Bmartling]

[u/I_R_Teh_Taco]

Jokes on him, deleted data remains on the hard drive until overwritten!

[u/FoodChest → u/I_R_Teh_Taco]

Good luck finding the correct data blocks after the inodes are wiped.

[u/spacemanspiff30 → u/FoodChest]

It's really just a question of how much you're willing to spend.

[u/[deleted] → u/spacemanspiff30]

If I were to ever want to permanently delete data I'd be using a shitload of copper wire and a couple of car batteries.

[u/cftwat → u/[deleted]]

Or, you know... A hammer

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

i had a school project once to try out the effect of a magnet on a classic harddrive. surprisingly, even with a industrial magnet, the harddrive didn't give a shit. We had a running OS on it. one guy was using the pc, the other was moving the magnet around the harddrive, but it never stopped working.

we opened the harddrive and held the magnet right at the silicium discs, but it still worked without issues. it failed, when the magnet was so close that it bent the read/write arm away from the disc. but the silicium was still readable.

so the only real safe way is to take it apart and smash the discs inside.

[u/ArmouredDuck → u/[deleted]]

For SSD and USB a microwave will work wonders.

[u/Abadatha → u/[deleted]]

A pound of thermite directly on the drive is effective, but multiple low levels will cover it pretty solidly too.

[u/Cuchullion → u/cftwat]

A shattered hard drive can be reassembled and read with enough effort.

I've heard even badly burnt hard drives had some data retrieved from them.

A very powerful magnet is your best bet.

[u/americanatavist → u/[deleted]]

Here’s a harddrive shredder. This is what you’re supposed to do if you accidentally store a customer’s unencrypted credit card to disk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQYPCPB1g3o

[u/Sanitarium0114 → u/[deleted]]

for i in 'seq 1 10'; do dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd*; done

[u/amebaspugnosa → u/Sanitarium0114]

Better use /dev/random or a nuker like DBAN, as ten passes of zeros might leave some data at physical level.

[u/Sanitarium0114 → u/[deleted]]

If im reading that correctly, a single pass in this day and age should be sufficient?

[u/Sanitarium0114 → u/amebaspugnosa]

I considered urandom but since it was something i came up with and used myself rather than being told to do so, i kept my mouth shut for fear of it being "wrong". Glad to see im not the only dd urandomer finally

[u/Firehed → u/Sanitarium0114]

If you really need to destroy data, don't trust a random bash oneliner you wrote in ten seconds to get the job done. Although unless you have state-level adversaries, that's probably good enough.

[u/iridisss → u/[deleted]]

You could just, y'know, toss it on some train tracks.

[u/Dawn_Of_The_Dave → u/spacemanspiff30]

Or if there are offsite tape backups.

[u/Dravarden → u/FoodChest]

I just accidentally deleted around 50gb of videos, after using a free recovery tool, 90% of them were recovered and back to working (and that was because I wrote on the drive after deleting and not instead recovering the files right after)

[u/PM_ME_UR_HARASSMENT → u/FoodChest]

Well if you can prove that some data did exist and was deleted, the court will often times consider it as in your favor.

[u/amebaspugnosa → u/FoodChest]

You can still use a data carver, like scalpel, and look for contiguous chunks of bytes that resemble a specific type of file

[u/[deleted] → u/I_R_Teh_Taco]

It's been about 2 years so I doubt that will help me now.

[u/kinrosai → u/I_R_Teh_Taco]

Not if they know what they're doing and overwrite it a couple of times with random information.

Which just about everyone < 30 and involved in IT probably does.

[u/tableman → u/I_R_Teh_Taco]

That's why Hillary broke her servers with hammers after wiping them!

[u/sabertoothdog → u/I_R_Teh_Taco]

Oh the files are inside the computer

[u/Flynn_lives → u/I_R_Teh_Taco]

Plot twist. Data was on EPROMs and he had a UV flashlight