How To Securely Delete Files

In this video I teach you how to fully and securely delete files on windows, Mac OS and Linux.

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[EpicTyphlosionTV]

I present you the award for "Most based thumbnail of the year"

[gordonfreemanthesemendemon]

for anyone seeing this vid later, you should be aware that software overwrites are inherently risky. on a HDD the magnetic head is not 100% accurate so parts of the data spills over horizontally and can be partially recovered even after overwriting. Even in SSDs if parts of the drive are damaged, software will obviously not be able to do anything to that data. The 35 pass overwrite mentioned in this video is called the "Gutmann method", and it was designed to mitigate the effects of HDD imprecision. It is quite outdated. Many of those 35 passes are irrelevent and you can cut down on the number considerably and be decently safe. but, no matter how many passes you do, there is still no guarantee of safety. If a government really wants your data for some reason, the best thing you can do to avoid a re-education camp is destroy the drive physically. Overwrite the data a bunch of times and then throw the whole thing into a furnace and then pray that aliens havent bestowed time travel upon the fbi yet.

[jakesllama]

"Be sure to share it with any friends, family or politiciand that could benefit from file deletion' 😁

[chemicalcoal]

The reason they recommend multiple overwrites of the drive is because the write head will oscillate over the track and its neighbors, this oscillation causes parts of the track to not be overwritten, additionally the write head does overwrite 100% of the media on the track. There are tools that can retrieve data from drives even after they have been overwritten 5-10 times depending on how "unlucky" your overwrites are.

[derektata]

Mental Outlaw coming at us with the dankest of memes

[seagie]

The NSA's official most effective method of data destruction is "turn the drive into a liquid and then back into a solid"
(I don't know if you mentioned this as I haven't watched the video)

[davidyoder]

So this is mostly true, but there are definitely much better ways to securely delete files from magnetic storage.

The one thing I want to point out here is that while overwriting files or free space with 1 pass of zeros is usually _good enough, _ it doesn't actually make it _impossible_ to recover data. There are a great many forensic tools out there that can communicate with the read head of mechanical drives. One of the techniques for recovering overwritten data is to read the magnetic capacitance of the read head for a specific byte. If the value is 0 but the capacitance is such that it is borderline 0, it indicates the value there before the overwrite was a 1. This is a gross oversimplification of the process but it works. There are a lot of patterns used to determine what the previous values were on magnetic media that has been overwritten.

When I overwrite drives for my clients, I do it from a GNU/Linux box and use 1 pass of random data. The "good enough" method for me is to use /dev/urandom to give me 256 bits of random data that I pass to openssl as a key, then use that key to encrypt the output of /dev/zero and use dd to write that output to the entire disk (not just a partition). It's a little complicated, but the script is only a few lines. This gets me a write speed of >100MB/sec on a typical 5400RPM drive connected over a USB 3.0 interface.

The point is to use 1 pass of random data and not 1 pass of zeros. If someone wants to recover the data from a drive after it's been wiped with random data, their job is much more difficult than it would be if I had only used 1 pass of zeros.

[Mtthw]

delete system32 securely and you'll be safe when you install a linux distro.

[eloquenthillbilly]

My method is much better.

Over write entire drive with spicy memes, encrypt drive, spend $30k+ on a drive shredder, shred drive, recycle shredded bits into new drive, overwrite drive with spicy memes, encrypt drive, use drive for target practice, incinerate drive.

Your method is too complicated.

[CarlosTrejo]

5:26 it’s actually possible, just really hard. That’s why it’s recommend it to do multiple runs

I my memory doesn’t fail me, I reading that you could read the voltage of those sectors and deduce what information was there before.

So for example, let’s say that you want to delete this information: 10011010. Overwriting will result to: but looking at the voltage you could figúrate out the original message. So the way it works, the computer reads the current flow and if the voltage is less that maybe 3V it will read as 0, and if it’s between 3 and 5V it will read as 1. (Again, I’m just remembering for what I read a long time ago and the numbers might be different).

So, reading the voltage you could get something like 2.5V, 1V, .9V, 2V, 1.9V, 0V, 2.7V, 1.2V. And effectively recovering the original message to 10011010

[akif]

Forgot to like it.. Found the vid again and liked, will also run it muted in loop to increase your watchtime. Great vid, good comments.

[jdsalazar]

Just a random video showed up and click it so fast because its interesting. Thank you for this

[INeedAttentionEXE]

HDD space is basically like extended memory that’s permanent until overwritten

[lordjellyfish]

Mental's profile pic isn't a cat with 4 diffent eyes, its corrupted and it lost some colour info

[AVIR]

I don't even need to delete files. I just watched because the thumbnail matched the title so perfectly 👏

[barms]

I always download files directly to spinning rust. First, for most documents that aren't HD video or large photo editing projects, you won't see much of a performance difference between opening/editing a document on a HDD vs SSD. Second, if you do download something that you'd rather not be recoverable after you delete it, spinning rust is easier and less destructive to the drive to overwrite with gibberish.

[techtiger]

1:18 top notch, also, amazing thumbnail

[donaldok.]

I'm a sys admin and love your vids.

[rafa.]

In windows you can use the cipher comand to overwrite deleted data

[jbruell]

I fucking love your videos. You're the man.