Securely Erase Drive/Drive Wipe

20 Jan

Darik’s nuke and boot is a great software that can securely erase data on a drive, and can be used to erase a drive that may have sensitive data. In this situation, I have deleted files in a USB flash drive with the regular method, and I have deleted files using DBAN and tried to recover the files after deleting files with both methods.

In this particular situation, I have normally erased a USB flash drive. I deleted the files in the USB flash drive through Windows by simply right clicking and clicking delete. This is a picture of the empty USB flash drive.

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Another great software called Recuva is used to recover deleted files, and was a program that I used to recover deleted files. This is a picture of the files that were recovered by Recuva when I used the regular method of deleting files. A lot of files were detected Recuva.

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DBAN does take some time to finish wiping the drive; however, the files are deleted and could not be recovered by Recuva.

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Both of these programs are easy to use and are straight forward. Recuva is very user friendly and features a wizard that walks you through deleting files.

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To run DBAN you will need to go into the boot menu and boot from the DBAN device. I used a CD, so I had to boot from the CD drive.

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