Shredding Information
I have three desktops that I’m trying to get down to 1. I’ve made a catalog of all of the hard drives in the systems (30GB x 3, 20GB, 15GB, and 7GB). I’ve pulled all of the important data off of the drives, and I’m in the middle of “shredding” them. I’ve shredded once drive so far with great success. I need to pull the other 4 drives out of the other two machines, and shred them as well. I may do that over the weekend.
The process of shredding a drive is pretty simple. There is a GNU tool called “shred”. You hook up the drive to a box, repartition it so that there is one large partition on the drive, and you issue the command ‘shred -v /dev/hdb1′. The program goes through 25 passes of writing stuff to the drive. It alternates between letters, numbers, and randomly chosen characters. It takes about 6-8 hours to do a 10GB drive, so it’s a lengthy process. However, it’s worth it to keep vital information (like our old Quickbook data) out of the wrong hands.
I’m pretty sure that shred can be overcome with some really expensive and advanced tools, but they are not going to be available to the average person. If the government or military really wants my information, I’m sure they have it in a file somewhere by now. I’m not worried about them too much.
I’ve also got a new Seagate 80GB drive on the way to me. I have a dead 80 gigger that I RMA’d yesterday, so I should be able to put an 80, and a 30 into the file server and have plenty of space to share out. It’s going to be a nice file server once I’m done with it. I also want to get a DVD burner for the file server, so that I can do backups and such from it.
