VeraWipe

As a data scientist, I am occasionally presented with the challenges of securing and recovering HDDs and SSDs. I am not an expert in either. However, I did perform the following experiment: 1) HDD: 3 GB; designation "D:" 2) format D: /FS:NTFS /V:test /X /P:3 3) Create Mary.txt file on the drive containing Mary Had a Little Lamb poem. 4) Test read, modify, save, and re-read Mary.txt. 5) Run VeraWipe against D: 6) Used Recuva and 2 other free data recovery programs recommended by Livewire. 7) Used Ease US Data Recovery Wizard against D: 8) Used Stellar Data Recovery against D: Step 2 forces the HDD to dismount, formats it with NTFS, names it "test", and overwrites the volume 3 times with random 0s and 1s, followed by writing 0s to every sector. While it's not a pristine as a new hard drive fresh out of its electrostatic wrapper, it's use on a well-used hard drive better simulates real-world conditions. If I simply deleted the file after Step 4, any file recovery software would recover it instantly. If I repeated the format as specified in Step 2, most file recovery software would NOT be able to recover it. As it was, none of the five data recovery software packages were able to recover Mary.txt or its contents in Steps 6, 7 and 8. While I cannot attest that VeraWipe rendered the data unrecoverable by all means at the disposal of well-funded data recovery specialists, I can attest that VeraWipe rendered the Mary.txt file on my 3 GB test hard drive both undetectable and unrecoverable by three free leading and two paid data recovery software packages. I scored VeraWipe as follows: Ease: 5 - Excellent Features: 3 - Just OK Design: 4 - Good Support: 3 - Just OK The features could use a bump, perhaps in the form of performing a light, medium and hard or exhaustive data wipe on the order of the 39 different data patterns designed to exhaust the magnetic fields throughout the platters. I would also like to see it being able to wipe multiple drives at once. The program barely stressed my computer at all. I could easily simultaneous run 8 instances on HDDs without it breaking a sweat. As for Design, after selecting the drive, the next screen made it unclear as to which partition 1 I'd selected! I could not tell if it was the one for my system drive, C:, or my test HDD, D:, making me a bit uneasy with respect to pressing the Wipe button. Ensuring the full drive and partition information that's been selected remain displayed at all times would help ease people's minds. The only reason I gave Support a 3 is because SourceForge's rating system has no "Does Not Apply" or "Not Applicable" rating. Simple, self-explanatory software such as VeraWipe doesn't require support. It should, however, carry more "unrecoverable" warnings, although that's kind of the point of the software, isn't it? All in all, a very simple, clean, easy to use but powerful piece of software for those of us who employ the Zero Trust model in our computing practices. I trust my security suite to guard my computer, but not to securely wipe my files. It's nice having a known good third-party utility unrelated to other software to perform these functions.