If you care about this, you are either doing something VERY unusual, or
you are paranoid.

Very unusual = you have national security data, terrorist data or
criminal activity data on your PC.

OTHERWISE (which is almost everyone), ANY actual overwrite of the data
... just a non-DOD, simple overwrite ... is all that you need. Once the
data is overwritten (any simple overwrite, non-DOD at all), retrieving
it becomes IMPOSSIBLE at a normal end-user level (no matter what
end-user software tools are used). At this point, while forensic,
non-end-user recovery is still possible, the cost goes up into 6-figures
(hundreds of thousands of dollars), the time required goes up into the
hundreds of hours (in a VERY specialized lab that very few have access
to at any cost) and not even law enforcement would attempt such recovery
unless there was a very specific, very compelling reason to do so.

[FWIW the long wipe wipes the disk more times with more patterns. Each
overwrite makes recovery more difficult, more expensive, and closer to
totally impossible (although actually achieving totally impossible is,
itself, impossible).]

The BEST way to eradicate data on a disk is not DOD approved. Disk
drives have a "secure erase" command (aka a "destroy yourself" command
... although only the data is destroyed, the drive itself is NOT
destroyed). This command is HIGHLY secure, once the command is issued
the action is done entirely within the drive, and it's more secure than
any external data elimination done by writing to the drive.

For more information on this, see:

http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml


Drew wrote:
> Hi All:
>
> Does anyone know the difference between the DOD short wip and the DOD
> long wipe of a hard drive?
>
> Is one more preferred than the other to make data from a hard drive
> unrecoverable?
>
> Which one is the actual standard that most techs are doing to wipe a
> drive?
>
> Thanks for any thoughts!
> Drew