Wiping Out Data

[Gabriel Dragffy]

Jim Dever wrote:
> There was a thread by the same name a while back where someone wanted to
> know the easiest way to wipe out all data on an HD.  DBAN was suggested.
> 
> Is there a similar utility that would work on USB drives?
> 
> Thanks!
> 

I know i'm a bit late getting to this, but it only occurred to me last 
night.

If you want the best security, and instead of agonizing over filesystems 
, wiping schemes, devices, and ecryption. What if you have a host OS, 
with an encrypted partition or even file, inside that file is a virtual 
machine. You use the virtual machine for everything sensitive. When you 
want to erase that you securely wipe the encrypted file (virtual machine 
container), the fact that it is encrypted means it will still be 
incredibly difficult to recover even if it can be undeleted. As an extra 
level of protection you could implement encryption and wiping within the 
VM also.

If you have a beafy computer then you can easily run a guest OS. At the 
moment I'm on a macbook pro with 2gb ram, but I spend most of my time 
living inside an ubuntu guest machine. For me, the benefit is I get to 
run Ubuntu with perfect hardware interaction, but security is also a 
major plus.