kill disk - anti identity theft

What would you do?


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from Gutmann's original paper "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory",

Wow old... it's referring to MFM Hard Disk drives.

Read the epilogues and especially the "Recommendations" from Gutmann's original paper [...]

Eh no thanks.. I got bored after a few seconds of viewing. I think Thermite is another good and more exciting method of permanent data deletion..
 
My neighbour recommends to send the HDs to his wife, as she reliably breaks anything technical, that she get's her fingers on.
 
What about throwing the disk into the sea? (preferably in a deep bit)
 
Despite the fact that it will pollute nature, this should only be done with harddiscs from Seagate. ;)
 
I know that sometimes I'm a bit boring, but I wanted to mention as a sidenote: It's a urban legend that you have to overwrite a harddisc several times by using different patterns to reliably destroy all data.


Heise (heise.de), which is a well known German publisher of (for example) the C't (computer magazine) some times ago mentioned this. The article can be found here (german): http://www.heise.de/...egt-198816.html There is also a link to the English version of the article at the bottom.


So in Linux, something like "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<harddiscdevice>" is sufficient, although smashing the drive is of course faster.


Other than that: Feel free to continue bringing in your ideas. I think we didn't mention acid yet.
 
Ha! Cheeeese touch.


Thanks for all the... imaginative solutions.


I'll likely opt for the format & ccleaner before hammer and screwdriver piercing, then thrown in the dump.


...much as I would rather bathe it in acid after shooting it with a magnum then drop it in my nearest volcano.. that just seems a little long for me.


Carry on though, we'll make an 'A to Z of data destruction' manual
 
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