HennesyXO
(?)Community Member
- Posted: Fri, 09 Mar 2012 05:09:12 +0000
OK, so, as a network engineer who has studied topics on encryption and security, I know damn well how easy it is to recover stuff like a highly compromising legal declaration, or let's be honest, that folder of lewd Japanese drawings of fictional girls, so in order to avoid this I religiously encrypt absolutely everything I wouldn't like others to see and I erase my hard drives' contents every week. The only thing that keeps me from using full disk encryption is the fact that Truecrypt doesn't supports dual-boot systems, and I require Windows because I'm a huge fan of Touhou Project and I've had a rather hard time getting Touhou games running on Debian Wheezy (I've only managed to run EOSD, Imperishable Night and Mountain of Faith).
The erasure process goes like this:
Thing is, because I spend very little time at home these erasing cycles have been starting to become very time-consuming, so now I'm forced to cut back on my disk cleaning efforts. That, and I'm also starting to become far more careful to not save plaintext on my computer in the first place (I always open a private window on Chromium prior to browsing 4chan or Danbooru).
So, basically, the question is: are these disk cleaning procedures enough?
The erasure process goes like this:
Weekly erasing: Just a quick pass of Windows's Eraser utility, then I fill my Linux partition with /dev/urandom noise and then I run sfill and sswap to clear anything that remained as well as my swap partition.
Bi-weekly erasing: Create a Truecrypt volume spanning all the partition's free space, run one pass of Eraser on them, then /dev/urandom, sfill and sswap on my Linux partitions.
Monthly erasing: Eraser on Windows is run with Bruce Schneier's 7-pass method, Linux erasure is done with 7 passes of /dev/urandom as well. This is finished with one final pass of encrypted /dev/urandom on everything.
Annual erasing: Uses 35-pass Gutmann instead of Schneier's 7-pass. This is followed with 3 passes of encrypted /dev/urandom on all my drives' free space.
Destroying a drive with DBAN and restoring its contents with Clonezilla is out of the question because it would be extremely lengthy and I don't have that much time to spare.
Thing is, because I spend very little time at home these erasing cycles have been starting to become very time-consuming, so now I'm forced to cut back on my disk cleaning efforts. That, and I'm also starting to become far more careful to not save plaintext on my computer in the first place (I always open a private window on Chromium prior to browsing 4chan or Danbooru).
So, basically, the question is: are these disk cleaning procedures enough?