Security/Privacy – Disk/File wiping not nearly as rigorous as I was led to believe

Just a short update.

It turns out that even the venerable Peter Guttman (who proposed in 1996 or so that we use a 35-pass wipe according to a strict algorithm to protect our old/deleted data) thinks that with today’s storage and recovery technologies, only a few passes are now needed to protect us from snooping.

I used to advocate the 35-pass wipe algorithm but now I think you only need to do that if you don’t know what types of passes should be used for the type of modern drive you have.

A private Wiki article.

The Guttman article with the Epilogue about the actually required passes versus the 35-pass algorithm.