what are your thoughts on autoclave?

[mrparker]

i was reading an article saying that many companies that go out of buisiness sell their old computer equipment at autions and such. some people do a simple delete while others reformatt the hardrive.then i went on to read that there are programs you can buy that can read a reformatted hd and its not that hard to find. a couple people used this to find old credit card info on the old computers. then they were taling about a freeware program called autoclave written by two mit guys which completly rewrites the hardrive in a way that cant be looked at by any methods that they know of. does anyone know more of this program or used it or know any flaws it may have? short of destroying your hd, physically,what can you do to clear out your computer incase a crook buys your equipment with the knowledge of how to get old info off your computer?

 

[RalfHutter]

I use Autoclave on all the HDDs that I sell. I run the "3 random passes" setting. I can't tell you how well it works because I'm not a forensic examiner and lack the ability to try and recover info off a hard drive like the FBI can but I'll choose to believe the experts that say it works quite well enough to defeat anything but the most high-tech methods of data recovery.

 

[tcsenter]

Apparently the developer of Autoclave did not know there were already 20 similar utilities available so he wrote his own. Oh well, its his time to waste.

Symantec's (Norton) WipeInfo has for several years offered various levels of hard disk data wiping from one-pass all the way up to DOD/NSA compliant routines developed for deleting and wiping the most sensitive data from government hard disks (before destruction). It used to be a stand-alone utility but is now a component of Norton Utilities (e.g. Norton System Works Professional).

I use the manufacturer's zero-write utilities, though they are terribly slow if you have a sizable HDD. My 30GB Maxtor took 4.5 hours to zero-write using PowerMax. Uhhg.

Generally, any zero-write (a.k.a. low-level format; a.k.a. zero-fill; a.k.a. disk pack) utility available from the hard disk manufacturer either as a stand-alone utility (e.g. Fujitsu's FJERASE or Zero-Fill) or a component of a hard disk diagnostic program (e.g. Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Diagnostics and Maxtor's PowerMax) is more than sufficient to prevent meaningful data recovery by all commercially available software utilities. They might get a byte here and a byte there, but will be totally unintelligible.

However, a one-pass zero-write will not be beyond the reach of more sophisticated 'clean-room' methods costing at least several hundred and more likely a couple thousand dollars.

If you believe anyone is so interested in any data you might have to spend a couple thousand dollars trying to retrieve it, then a manufacturer's zero-write utility is not for you.