Hard Drive Wipe

Informal poll. How effective do you guys think wiping your hard drive really is?

I was talking to a guy at a computer repair shop who said he can look right through a wiped hard drive if he really wants to.

He said in the past he's been hired by lawyers, private investigators, law enforcement, etc. to recovered deleted information from all kinds of people's hard drives. Like a lady who suspected her husband of cheating had him find emails to his mistress and online bank transactions where he sent money from their account to his mistress on an old hard drive and stuff like that. She was able to take him for all he was worth in divorce court because of the information this computer guy recovered. The guy had just assumed the information was deleted and gone forever.

All kinds of stories like that. He said if he has someone's computer he basically has the ability to find out anything and everything about them in their life. He said he finally had to stop taking work like that because it made him feel too creepy to bust people like that so easily. Doesn't matter if they used wipe free space or not. He can get around it.

What do you guys think?

 

Well if you just reformat the information can be recovered However if you run a program like Darik's Boot And Nuke that writes 0's across your entire hard drive it's very hard to recover data. Next to impossible.

 

To back up what PClover said, he is very much correct.
in most cases a simply deleted file can be recovered but HDD nuking utilities which do multiple write/format passes over a hdd make it next to impossible to retreve data.

 

If you're going to nuke a drive, may as well get the drive makers free utility and bring it back to factory condition. I'm not sure if they do multi-passes though. Anyways, 7 passes is the DoD accepted norm.