Ccleaner - Drive wipe

Money_Saver

Afternoon

I have used the above on an external HDD which I wish to sell. After running the above, would it be considered safe to sell knowing my previous data is erased?

Do I need to format the drive before I can sell it?

Thanks for your help.

danmanchester

Kind of depends on what strength overwrite you used - the 7 times one would be considered safe.

If you used the simple overwrite (1 pass) or even the advanced (3 passes) it may still be technically possible to recover files....for the very determined.

Test it yourself by running something like Recuva and see if it finds anything, if it does then do one of the stronger overwrites or use a different drive wiper like Dban.

tronator

danmanchester wrote: »

Kind of depends on what strength overwrite you used - the 7 times one would be considered safe.

I think it depends on who you ask ;-)

danmanchester wrote: »

If you used the simple overwrite (1 pass) or even the advanced (3 passes) it may still be technically possible to recover files....for the very determined.

Test it yourself by running something like Recuva and see if it finds anything, if it does then do one of the stronger overwrites or use a different drive wiper like Dban.

It's a safe bet that Recuva will not find anything after 1 pass overwrite if ccleaner does it right.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_erasure
"... for ATA disk drives manufactured after 2001 (over 15 GB) clearing by overwriting the media once is adequate to protect the media from both keyboard and laboratory attack.

All claims that data can be recovered after one pass overwriting are of a theoretical nature. AFAIK there is no documented case where it has been done successfully.

System

Hi

Google for Shirley Porter and Vogon International and....

Vogon International became involved in 2003 when Westminster City Council obtained third party disclosure orders against companies and individuals in the UK. Investigators took complete images of the hard disks contained in various computers, which were then processed, and forensic recovery techniques were used to analyse deleted files. This provided important evidence for Westminster.


Expensive but possible. Bleachbit comes well recommended.

esuhl

johndough wrote: »

Bleachbit comes well recommended.

Isn't BleachBit just a Linux equivalent of CCleaner...? As I understand it, both will wipe "free space" on the drive.

Personally, I wouldn't sell a used hard drive, but if I had to, I'd probably use DBAN to wipe the drive. (Just make sure you've disconnected any hard drives with data you want to keep!)

http://www.dban.org/

tronator

johndough wrote: »

Hi

Google for Shirley Porter and Vogon International and....

Vogon International became involved in 2003 when Westminster City Council obtained third party disclosure orders against companies and individuals in the UK. Investigators took complete images of the hard disks contained in various computers, which were then processed, and forensic recovery techniques were used to analyse deleted files. This provided important evidence for Westminster.


Expensive but possible. Bleachbit comes well recommended.

I didn't find any reference of what they meant by "deleted files". Everyone knows that you can recover files if you only hit the delete button in your file browser.

I was talking about wiping a hard disk with

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX

and the like. I don't know ccleaner, so I don't know what it is doing.