Securely erase a partition/device
Open source disk encryption with strong security for the Paranoid
Brought to you by:
idrassi
Menu
ā¾
ā“
In the Documentation >> Plausible Deniability , it said, "in fact, VeraCrypt can be used to securely erase a partition/device too, by creating an empty encrypted partition/device-hosted volume within it", what does it mean? If I want to erase the USB entirely and securely by using VeraCrypt, what should I do?
I could be that, when encrypting the entire device, you can select the "wipe mode" to overwrite the previous deleted data? Iām not 100% sure though. This will only be effective on magnetic disks, as flash-based storage like USB thumb drives, SD cards, SSD drives etc cannot be wiped in the same way. If you wish to erase a USB drive, format the USB drive in Windows and remove the tick from the "quick format" option. Depending on the storage capacity of the drive, it will take many minutes or even several hours to complete.
The "wipe mode" in VeraCrypt and similar software only needs one pass to erase a device effectively. See this for more detail: https://docs.bleachbit.org/doc/shred-files-and-wipe-disks.html
That's mean the way to securely erase a USB by VeraCrypt, is to Encrypt a non-system partition/drive >> Standard VeraCrypt volume >> Select Device (USB) >> Create encrypted volume and format it >> follow the instruction and leave the option (Quick format) unchecked.
Finally the selected USB will be encrypted and the data currently stored on the USB will be overwrited ? or Just delete to Recycle Bin? .
Also, after the encryption, I can decrypt the USB so all data is lost and overwritten securely?
@debiec: I confirm you understanding. The documentation means that you can wipe a drive by encrypting it without checking the option "Quick Format" (the simplest is to select None as filesystem unless you want to use the drive afterwards).
This way, all bytes on the disk will be overwritten and this is quivalent to a single pass random pattern wipe mode which is enough to erase all trace of previously stored data on the disk as recent studies shows. But you repeat the operation many times for more confidenceb if you like but please note that for SSDs a single pass is enough thanks to their design and repeating this operation will reduce the SSD life time (SSds can extra hidden spare cells for wear-leveling but not enough to store significant amount of data)