I wipe a new drive for two reasons. 1) I like to make sure it's nice and clean which makes me comfortable. It bothers me if I don't.
2) I can make a reasonable determination about which sectors were used when setting up the partition table(s) and any boot loaders so I know which sectors were used and need to be backed up. Yes, I'm actually going to use dd to back up that space outside of any partition and store it elsewhere so I can restore it later if it is needed. I prefer to be safe rather than sorry. In today's cyberspace you just can't run without a backup. It's not a question of if you will be attacked, but when and how. I refuse to pay a ransom. If you get a used drive and you are curious then sure, you could go snooping around. I remember when we used a VAX running VMS back in college. It would allocate some huge amount of disk space when compiling our C programs, even though it wasn't used or cleared. I found old deleted emails from other users in that slack space. Yes, they were in plain text. We later found an option to use when compiling our programs to prevent that so our programs didn't have to use as much space which was limited by a disk quota. name=Matthew%20Campbell&email=trenix25%40pm.me -------- Original Message -------- On Jun 10, 2020, 6:58 AM, Anders Andersson wrote: > On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 3:33 PM Nicolas George <geo...@nsup.org> wrote: >> >> Anders Andersson (12020-06-10): >> > Except wiping a disk is trivial. Just start the job and come back >> > later to a clean disk. It's not like you have to wipe it by hand. I do >> > it routinely before I put a disk to use that's going to be used for a >> > couple of years. >> >> There is no "except" about: define your threat model; if it requires >> wiping, wipe. If it does not, wiping is just a waste of time, little or >> lots, still a waste. And it is a waste of power too. >> >> There are many things that are trivial to do with a hard drive and could >> benefit security in far-fetched scenarios. Did you wipe the possible >> traces of cocaine? Did you weight it to check it matches the specs? Did >> you take pictures of all angles? All these and many others are trivial. >> Why one but not the others? > > Because the police raiding my house for dealing drugs is not a > realistic threat. Looking at my drives for running Tor could be.
