Take the tour ×  I happen to know that formatting a disk even 10
times does not destroy everything. Is there a good shredding
utility I can use on Linux ?  share|improve this question Zero-
filling does. dd is enough for that. –  Dennis Jan 26 at 0:16
Need to do it more than once. And even so data can be recovered.
Use shred(1) on the disk. It also works on files, but not on
COW-based filesystems like btrfs. –  vonbrand Jan 26 at 7:56 I
always scratch my head over posts like these. Not to many people
have the equipment to read data that has been overwritten even
once. And those that do are likely to get your data before you
can erase it... –  Keltari Jan 26 at 9:27 @Keltari: I hear you,
but still it is good to know –  statquant Jan 26 at 12:44 add
comment  3 Answers  up vote 1 down vote accepted  With
conventional hard drives, a single wipe with zeros may be enough
The 'multiple wipes' method assumes that you're using older
drives (with larger magnetic domains). The 'definitive' paper on
data destruction by g