spares_zero still exists, but you need to set your privledge move to diag rather than advanced.

This is supposed to all be fixed in an upcoming release and there will be an officially blessed way to do this. Stay tuned.

Hope this helps.

-- Adam Fox NetApp Professional Services, NC adamfox@netapp.com

-----Original Message----- From: Chris Thompson [mailto:cet1@cus.cam.ac.uk] Sent: Wednesday, July 11, 2001 6:22 PM To: Adam.Fox@netapp.com Cc: meital.israel@intel.com; toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: Deleting data on NetApp.

Adam.Fox@netapp.com writes about erasing disc contents:

...

This comes up quite a bit. It all depends on who how sophisticated you think the person is who may be trying to retrieve the data is.

For 99.99% of the world, just zero'ing the disks (even

multiple times

...

if it makes you feel comfortable) is enough.

There remains the question of how to do this conveniently within a NetApp filer. In the past I have made a dummy volume and added the disks to be erased to it, but I wouldn't be too sure that this zeros the area at the end of the disk after the right-sized point.

ONTAP 5.x had a "zero_spares" command in rc_toggle_basic mode, but this seems to have gone from advanced mode in ONTAP 6.x.

...

I suppose you could create some dummy data to put on the disks after you zero out the disks, then zero them out again. But

that's a lot of

...

time and effort to get you from 99.99% to 99.999%.

If you are concerned about professional, government-backed

efforts to

...

recover the data, then your only real option is to destroy the disks entirely. Bust them into thousands of pieces and dispose

of those pieces

...

in different trash containers.

... and we've had all sorts of imaginative elaborations along the lines of physical mutilation!

I'm no expert on this sort of thing, but wouldn't baking the disc for a few hours at a temperature comfortably above the Curie point of the recording medium be a useful preparatory step?

Chris Thompson University of Cambridge Computing Service, Email: cet1@ucs.cam.ac.uk New Museums Site, Cambridge CB2 3QG, Phone: +44 1223 334715 United Kingdom.