I have always believed in driving a punch through the disk surface is better than a hammer. It will bend the disk beyond repair, and will never turn again.

Drill, Isopropyl and fire. Hehe... goggles!

You could try encrypting the file name before you delete the file. Thus any snoop would be unable to find any meaningful file names in a list of file names created by recovery software.

ecryptfs is an encryption program which has an option called ecryptfs_enable_filename_crypto=(y/n) to encrypt file names. The ecryptfs man page is at:

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/...cryptfs.7.html

from the ecryptfs man page:

ecryptfs_enable_filename_crypto=(y/n)
Specify whether filename encryption should be enabled. If not,
the mount helper will not prompt the user for the filename
encryption key signature (default).

You can download ecryptfs here:

http://ecryptfs.org

I have never used ecryptfs so I can't vouch for its effectiveness.

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I do use ccrypt to shred files even though ccrypt is not designed to do so, but ccrypt will not encrypt a file name. The way to use ccrypt as a shredder is to encrypt a file. Then remove the .cpt extention that ccrypt adds to file names when it has encrypted a file. Then use ccrypt to encrypt the file a second time using a different key. The second encryption destroys the metadata containing the first encryption key so that you cannot ever decrypt the file even if you know both keys.

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Steve Stites

P.S. If you are anal you can repeat the encryption for several more layers.

You can never actually be sure that every trace of the file is deleted, due to the nature of today's "very SMART™" disk drives.

Your best bet is to find your friendly neighborhood steel-mill, and drop the thing into a blast furnace.

You may not want to destroy the drive but some movie just through a sim chip in a microwave so I had to look up:

Hard Drive in Microwave
https://youtu.be/YQ0qNQLLR80

for this thread, works with laptops and other devices too...

That fried the electronics, but didn't hurt the data on the platters at all. That data would be totally recoverable by transplanting the spindle to a another drive of the same model.

You can never be 100% sure that the data on any storage device is "unrecoverably destroyed." There may be fragments or even complete copies of the data anywhere. The drive, itself, is "smart," and may keep additional copies in "spared" sectors.

Rknichols:

Maybe.

My first thought of what I'd find was something like:

Microwave Me: Hard Drive
https://youtu.be/HIyZeB5H9WQ

That one should work (DOESN'T GO INTO SAFETY FIRST! )

Tho lighter fluid, a drill and matches would be my go to... (unless I had that guys microwave. )

The drive destruction... yes... it has been tried...
Good luck!

"DEF CON 23 - Zoz - And That's How I Lost My Other Eye...Explorations in Data Destruction (Fixed)"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bpX8YvNg6Y