I'm looking to sell a couple of external hard drives and want to ensure that all the data is completely wiped and unrecoverable. I've heard that tools like DBAN and the command 'clean all' might not be entirely reliable for this purpose. Is it possible to use VeraCrypt to encrypt the entire hard drive, even if it's already full of files, and basically format it to make the data unrecoverable?
1 Answer
Honestly, if you're worried about data recovery, one overwrite usually does the trick for most situations. However, if you just want to be extra cautious, doing multiple overwrites doesn’t hurt. Unless you're worried about super high-level forensic recovery, a single pass should suffice!
Thanks! So, just to confirm, a single pass with DBAN is good enough? And could I also use BitLocker to encrypt the drive and format it in the process?