New subject: Deleting data on NetApp.

9 Jul 2001


      A more practical suggestion: Industrial strength electric drill.
No joke. I know a company which deals with very confidentional information
(a service provider for tax consultants) which drills a hole right through
every old disk drive before it leaves the premises.
-Ernst
-----Original Message-----
From: Honeycutt, Michael [mailto:MichaelHoneycutt@NC.SLR.com]
Sent: Montag, 9. Juli 2001 22:23
To: 'Jeffrey Krueger'; Fox, Adam
Cc: 'Israel, Meital'; NetApp Mailing List (E-mail)
Subject: RE: Deleting data on NetApp.
Try an electromagnet. I hear they work wonders on disk data :)
-----Original Message-----
From: Jeffrey Krueger [mailto:jkrueger@qualcomm.com]
Sent: Monday, July 09, 2001 3:56 PM
To: Fox, Adam
Cc: 'Israel, Meital'; NetApp Mailing List (E-mail)
Subject: Re: Deleting data on NetApp.
I just wish I could delete files on a NetApp from the console.  It takes
forever and a day to remove a hundred or more GB off a filer from either
CIFS or NFS.
An "rm" in the ONTAP CLI would be super handy.  It could work *much* faster
then over the wire.  Further, an "rm -F" to delete files through the active
file system and all snapshots would even be keener.  =)
-- Jeff
On Mon, Jul 09, 2001 at 07:59:53AM -0700, Fox, Adam wrote:
...
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.
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.  While this is certainly expensive since
you can't return or re-use the disks, it is by far the most secure. 
However, there are very few people who need this level of security, but
it's an option if your data abosulutely cannot ever be recovered.
Hope this helps.
-- Adam Fox
NetApp Professional Services, NC
adamfox@netapp.com
...
-----Original Message-----
From: Israel, Meital [mailto:meital.israel@intel.com]
Sent: Monday, July 09, 2001 8:55 AM
To: NetApp Mailing List (E-mail)
Subject: Deleting data on NetApp.
Hi All,
Does anyone know a utility to format the NetApp disks without 
being able to
unformat it?
Thanks,

Meital