Spring Wiping.

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LittleJess

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Well It's the time of year that I wipe my hard drives clean with zeros, and call apon the gods of ATA secure erase.

That being said, my hard drives are wiped now, anyone else do the same or am I an odd one?
 
I don't see a point in wiping my harddrive clean unless I'm selling my rig. I don't want to re-download 200+GB of PC games.
 
SnowBlitz said:
I don't see a point in wiping my harddrive clean unless I'm selling my rig. I don't want to re-download 200+GB of PC games.

I do it, just in case, you never know when someone will break in and steal your computer.
 
I don't get the point of that. I mean I guess you are preventing someone from getting older sensitive data that you no longer need, but if someone steals your drives they're going to get everything from the last time you did the wipe, and for most people the most recent stuff is going to be the most sensitive anyway.

Personally I just use full disk encryption on all my boxes (dm-crypt+luks for linux, GELI/GEOM on my bsd boxes). Someone steals my drives, they're at least not going to get any usable data off them.
 
BoundCoder said:
I don't get the point of that. I mean I guess you are preventing someone from getting older sensitive data that you no longer need, but if someone steals your drives they're going to get everything from the last time you did the wipe, and for most people the most recent stuff is going to be the most sensitive anyway.

Personally I just use full disk encryption on all my boxes (dm-crypt+luks for linux, GELI/GEOM on my bsd boxes). Someone steals my drives, they're at least not going to get any usable data off them.

I use FDE as well, I wipe as a precaution, I generally wipe all drives once a year, usually when I do major maintenance on my computer, replace some ram or something.

Reason being is technology changes so fast, and I'm going to have this computer for a while, I don't want my computer stolen in 5 years (and people being able to some how recover the data due to the technology improving) with older drives I wipe them with zeros, grab a hammer and sand the platters. ;)
 
Shybug said:
I do it, just in case, you never know when someone will break in and steal your computer.


Well, you got me there haha.
 
I have an external drive that needs to be reformatted because of errors... but I've been delaying that. I think I'll do it today.

AHHHH! It says it'll take over a day to move all the files to another drive! :eek!:

Ten hours later... 20% backed up.
 
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If the drive has errors.... It is not likely going to be worth reformatting it. For things like my photos I have a 3-2-1 backup procedure, 3 copies, 2 different medics and 1 is offsite. I have 2 hard drives; working and backup. I only plug in backup to copy files to it and then unplug it, my off site is Amazon cloud


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
 
diapernh said:
If the drive has errors.... It is not likely going to be worth reformatting it. For things like my photos I have a 3-2-1 backup procedure, 3 copies, 2 different medics and 1 is offsite. I have 2 hard drives; working and backup. I only plug in backup to copy files to it and then unplug it, my off site is Amazon cloud


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Well, it isn't non-functional. I've heard a reformat can sometimes, not always, "bypass" the errors. But if I'm wrong, then I'm wrong. :confused: I'm going to see what happens. If nothing else, I guess it's better than letting my data sit there until the drive stops working.

The problem drive has one current pending sector. The backup is finally done, so I'm going to try a reformat. Full, not quick.
 
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Is your middle name Hillary?
 
I don't bother writing zeros. If the pc isn't working good and needs to be reinstalled, formatting is more than enough. If I'm getting rid of the drive, a strong magnet is quicker and more definitive in destroying old data.
 
If my computer starts slowing down or having issues I usually back up my data and erase the disks, I have no patience with dealing with Windows problems so that's my solution probably once a year ;)
 
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