Safe ways to remove sensitive data?

sufdisk -ldd if=/dev/urandum of=/dev/sdX

The best practical way without James Bond gear? Bench grinder. Make sure it's all dust. Wear a filter.

This is the worst translation I've ever seen.

More people have drills than benchgrinders. If he wants to be super cheap, all he really needs is a torx bit to open it up and a rock to smash the platters. There's a nice magnet in there too.

Drilling it or setting it on fire won't elimintate the magnetism of all the 1's and 0's on the drive. It could still feasibly be recovered with special tools that ignore disk sectors. You have to do and then shred the disks with a grinder down to the last peice of steel if you want to be sure. But in reality you shouldn't be placing that data on a modern computer if you care so much as to securely destroy it.

Does putting CDs in a microwave effectively get rid of their content?

No because the same principle as the magnet for hdd's apply. If you don't destroy every single 1 and 0 it can still feasibly be recovered by extreme autism. Shred it into tiny fragments or delaminate it to the point you have melted it into slag.

Use full diek encryption, or at least encrypt the partition that has confidential data, like /home and /tmp (but you're better off to have /tmp as a ram disk). Swap partition also, if you have one - OpenBSD encrypts this by default since like forever.
Then when it's time to get rid of disk, format every partition, and then overwrite every single disk block with 'dd' (that'll cover also the boot sector and partition tables).

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This, but modify DD a bit for better performance and confirmed writes (also, shows progress):

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdX bs=1M status=progress iflag=nocache oflag=nocache

Also for any windowsfags reading this you can secure erase even easier, format the disk so it's got nothing on it, then do:

cipher.exe /w:driveletterhere:

Fills up the disk with zeros, then all 1s, then pseudorandom crap.

Lot of CIAniggers in here

Nope, unless your thread model is a nation-state actor and the information you're attempting to delete is the kind of stuff that's big enough to bring them down.

Which it isn't. Your paranoia goes too far here - There is no feasible recovery once platters have been removed or disrupted from the spindle, and fractured.

The only conceivable recovery procedure at this point is via some kind of 2d plane electron microscope with a resolution equal or greater than the density of the platter. Which isn't a thing. On the unlikely chance it is a thing, it's a thing that only said nation states possess.

We're talking about confidential level info, like your passwords and bank records. It's not top secret spy shit. If you're in that world, you already know what to do and don't come to Holla Forums for answers.

Technically you're correct. They might be able to recover portions of the platter assuming they can reassemble it. The only people with enough time and money to waste would be government agencies, in which case you should have already used full disk encryption if you're that paranoid.

This gets rid of the microwave.

I'm not the other super paranoid anons, but something to bear in mind with FDE is that over time, the chances it'll be broken increase.

Generally, when relying on FDE, factor in an assumption that it'll be broken in 10 years time.

If that's not palatable, you need additional control measures in addition to FDE.

We're talking about a platter that has been drilled through. It would be a minor miracle if they can pull anything off an unencrypted drive.

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Well if you want to know how military intelligence does it (I was in a unit that worked with them) this is what they told me: format the disks, then sand the platters down with power tools, and then incinerate the dust. This was a long time ago, before circuit boards had lots of firmware and cache.
I guess today you could just melt the whole thing into slag with thermite, somewhere outside away from things that will catch fire.

Put hard drive in acid

Problem solved

are we taking about an SSD or HDD?

This is what I learned. Wipe the drive securely with rand, 0s, and then disassemble the drive and sand the platters then finally drop the platters into barrels of acid for a week.

1. Open up the hard drive using a torx screwdriver
2. Physically remove the platters
3. Sand down the surface to the platters

Realistically, what can you do with platter sand? It'll be a hell of a time even beginning to reconstruct the data with just dust, let alone figuring out which corresponds to which platter. Although I can imagine using some sort of scifi microscopic patterning scheme to figure out how atleast which pieces of sand should be next to which, but then what about reconstructing the disk into a machine readable format? You could probably do microforging to piece it all together and then run some super secret cyberpunk 1s and 0s from thin air error correction to reproduce the data, IF reforging doesn't screw with magnetism.

I don't know anything about how data partitioning works, let alone how disks are written to and all the following electromagnetism voodoo. All I know is that flash memory is leagues easier to destroy by virtue of being smaller and more electrochemical and less physics magic. There's no phantom particles eliminating off of solid state transistors (as far as I know, which is worthless), so overwriting all data including onboard blobs should be sufficient, but the CIA still dishes out the same recommendation as pulverization and incineration for HDDs.

Look at how many retarded answers.
Just burn it, throw it in a melting pot.

I was thinking the same thing. Most of these replies are overkill. I threw mine in my firepit and lit a fire and I can only find scraps of it now.

Darik's Boot and Nuke. dban.org/

What incriminating data are you trying to hide from the police, user?

have you ever tried to hit a hard drive data plate with a sledge hammer? Good luck. You might put some scratches on it. You'd have to put that shit in an incinerator or something.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph Stalin. Use thermite to dispose of your drives you fags. Rust from iron(grill grate) and finely shredded tin foil. Put it on the fucking thing and light it.

You could use BleachBit lol

HDD platters are made of aluminium. So you can just heat them up (m.p. ~660 C) or bend them around a bit.

< Zero out your hard drive
< Run a high power magnet over it.
< Burn it with thermite
< Throw the burning disk drive into an industrial drive shredder
< burn the shredded debris and run a magnet over it again
< Take the remaining debris and throw it back through the shredder for good measure.
< Take a loaded gun
< Blow your brains out
< Your data is now probably secure

1) Install Windows 95
2) Connect to internet
3) Wait as someone in China locks your data

Magnets don't affect solid state storage. Try it with a usb stick. Unless your magnet is powerful enough to damage it by crushing the connector, there won't be anything wrong with it.

Yes, and it broke into pieces.

bleachbit

If its still working then writing overwriting it randomly a few times should do the trick.

Also dumping it into molten pool of steel would be a sure way.

I mean, judging by how tons of secret convos and email are leaked this wouldn't be out of the question entirely.

not fed here, common protocol on servers that we want to disappear the data on we run on raid 10 and only use laptop hard drives, each drive is given to an individual agent, who while still in the facility throws the drive against the concrete floor, shattering the ceramic platter inside.

This, except you do it twice, or thrice for good measure.
No CIA-Nigger will be able to get your personal data then unless your hard drive has a whole separate hard drive inside it that stores all your CP, or a hidden network card that will phone everything you do home.
With SSDs I recommend issuing SECURE_ERASE to every single block and then writing randomness twice too.

Yeah, because you privacy is irrelevant. Government obviously don't give a fuck about it.
If you live in a dictatorship, and you have some weapons/explosives related pdf on your computer, it's totaly ok. Police will just shake your hand.

What a fucking faggot. I hate them. I hate these fucking shills always saying "YOU DON'T NEED IT!!" "GOVERNMENT DOESN'T CARE ABOUT YOU" and shit.

Phy

user obviously fudged and got it in reverse.

The data on an SSD is stored as an electrical charge. I'll bet if you took some insulated copper wire, wrapped it around the SSD many times, then connected the ends to positive / negative on a car battery, then reverse the poles, there would be data loss. I only have one SSD and it's my main, otherwise I would test this.

Induced charge would fry it, but it doesn't use magnetism to store data and wouldn't be affected by a generated field.

DoD 5220.22-M

It's called electromagnetism for a reason. A changing magnetic field creates a changing electric field. That's how charge is induced in the first place. I'm not going to claim to be an expert on SSDs, but if the bits are stored as charge, a changing magnetic field, such as the initial powering off a coil from a car battery should theoretically be able to flip some bits.

You'd not get any significant charge with a single, manual flip.

No. Your understanding is wrong for SSDs. What you mention about magnetic field is true for old disc drives, or magnetic tape - which is why they carried the magnet warning on the media labels. They could be affected by magnetic fields. SSDs require electrical current and are >shielded< against magnetic effects.
You would need a significant EMP event to create a very high >induced charge< on the device to fry it.
Flipping magnetic poles, of the insulated copper wire you mention, for a changing magnetic field wouldn't do anything. The only caveat is if the switching induced a >current< spike within the device.

'shielded' = inherent by design

A family friend of mine worked in computer forensics(I probably have that title wrong) and his big story about it was the case where he recovered data from a hard drive that someone took a power drill to it. If you're aiming to destroy the data, be very thorough.

I was told by some guy in the army that's how they do it.
Overwrite everything, then throw the disks into a Thermite oven.

It's really not worth even considering overwriting as many disks you dispose of are dead and can't be written to. Degaussing is one option.

blast with piss

Literally blow up the HDD

feed it to your overweight aunt

No fucking way. Modern physics laws say that all processes are reversible, unless it involves black hole.

modern physics cant actually predict the forward process with certainty (chaos). how will it correctly reverse the unpredictable process?
run the grinder in reverse and 'un-grind' the pieces back on to the platter?
Nope.
Entropy, learn about it.

Even in dictatorships, the spy agencies have better things to do than to spend a decade reassembling the broken pieces of every autist's harddrive.
Assuming you aren't part of a resistance group in your dictatorship, the state won't spend nearly close to its full potential to fuck with you.

Same can be said of the West. Unless you're politically relevant, the only opponents you'll have are police-level, which don't have the future-tech.
If you always assume that the state will throw its full resources against you, you'll end up living in a man-sized cave spending your days encrypting everything by hand and writing it on dried leaves.
The government cares about your privacy, but it doesn't go full yandere (usually)

t. manlet

Use RAID 0.

And if you are, chances are you don't have a right to reject decrypting your files, so no amount of OPSEC will save you if you are already on their watchlist. It might save your friends, though.

I have always seen some of the most hardcore security schemes as LARPing. If you assume a dystopia in which the government has already set their eyes on you, enough to dedicate their future tech to crack open your anime loli stash, no amount of plausible deniability will save you. The idea is not to get in their watchlist in the first place, and for that, you need security measures that help you circumvent their passive spying measures (traffic tapping, mass backdoors, etc) so you avoid ending up in their watchlist. Not saying HDD encryption is useless, but an encrypted HDD isn't gonna stop a rampaging government.