Quote from: astor on May 22, 2013, 06:18 pmHey thanks. :) I originally posted that to disprove the persistent myth that you need 7, or 15, or -- laughably -- 35 writes to make data unrecoverable.Under controlled conditions, where the researchers know where to look and what to look for, a single write is sufficient to prevent recovering anything except random, useless bits of information. Under realistic conditions, it should be even harder to recover anything useful. Even the NSA admits that additional overwrites offer no benefit (this is their recommendation to other government agencies that require secure data erase, for example to comply with HIPAA regulations, so it's unlikely they're lying to screw us over).The analysis paper happens to contain a lot of other useful information. One reason that I like full disk/volume encryption is it allows for near-instant secure data wipes. All you have to do is write over the first 10 or 100 megabytes of the drive, which takes a few seconds to a few tens of seconds, and you have securely wiped your disk. DBANing can take hours to days.Agreed, but my method was far more entertaining.I use 3 passes, simply to play it safe, just as how the more secure of us use logless VPN's to access Tor even though in theory Tor should be perfectly fine on it's own. Better safe than sorry!