Question

I want to write an application that removes data from a hard drive. Are there any standards that I need to adhere to which will ensure that my software removes at least the bare minimum, or should I just use off the shelf software? If so any advice?

Answer 1

I think any “standard” you may encounter won’t be any less science fiction or science mysticism than anything you come up with yourself. Basically, as long as you physically overwrite the data (even just once), there’s no commercial forensic service that – even in the face of any amount of money you throw at them – will claim to be able to recover your data.

(Any “overwrite 35 times with rotating bit patterns” advice may have been true for coarsely spaced magnetic tapes in the 1970s, but it is entirely irrelevant for contemporary hard disks).

The far more important problem you have to solve is how to overwrite data physically. This is essentially impossible through any sort of application or even OS programming, and you’ll have to find a way to talk to the hardware properly and get a reliable confirmation that the location you intended to write to has indeed be written to, and that there aren’t any relocations of the clusters in question to other parts of the disk that might leak the data.

So in essence this is a very low-level question that’ll probably have you pouring over your hard disk manufacturer’s manuals quite a bit if you want a genuine solution.