This leaves something like 90% of the data still accessible. If you're at this level of security I'd recommend chipping the drives into small pieces or immersing them in molten metal in a forge or mashing them beyond recognition with a 20 lb sledge. That last technique is even kinda fun. Have a party.
In normal use, it is impossible to view the previous contents of a file once it and all snapshots containing it are deleted. WAFL zeroes every block before allocating it to a file, so you can't create a file and write to the millionth byte in the expectation of seeing a meg of info from deleted files the way you can on many other filesystems.
Alan
=============================================================== Alan G. Yoder, Ph.D. agy@netapp.com Network Appliance, Inc. Sunnyvale, CA 408-822-6919 ===============================================================
-----Original Message----- From: Bokkelkamp Ernst SBS ITS GDP 2 14 [mailto:Ernst.Bokkelkamp@mch10.sbs.de] Sent: Monday, July 09, 2001 2:26 PM To: Honeycutt, Michael; 'Jeffrey Krueger'; Fox, Adam Cc: 'Israel, Meital'; NetApp Mailing List (E-mail) Subject: RE: Deleting data on NetApp.
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
-
Yoder, Alan