Disc Utilities

You know, it’s just occurred that I’m rather lucky, as a Mac owner, to have a copy of Disc Utility to hand.

For some year’s, now, I’ve been aware of basic computer security issues; little thing like making sure I don’t reply to dubious looking emails – we’ve probably all had one along the lines “Dear Friend, I represent a person who needs to get a large amount of money out of A. N. Country - if you give us your bank details, we’ll dump it there, and give you a percentage” – or making sure I BCC people, when I want to send an email to a lot of people – I’m guilty of that, certainly – and encrypting files on USB stick, if it’s sensitive info that should be keep limited to as few people as possible.

Which the UK’s Civil Service seems to be rather bad at doing, when they leave laptops on trains …

I also know that if I’m replacing a hard drive, it’s important to make sure of a thing or two.

From the little bits and bobs I’ve picked up over the years – having worked in a pub full of cabbies, bankers and, more to the point, here, IT professionals – I know that our computers hard-drives are capable of storing huge amounts of information.

Music, video, photos, letters we’re writing, recipes; near enough everything, bar the kitchen sink.

And if you’re a kitchen sink designer, I’m not going to take bets, there, either …

It also stores things we take to take for granted that we’ve put there; things like passwords, personal information, bank details.

Stuff like that.

Stuff that we’d rather keep to ourselves, if at all possible, and not handed to people who’d be happy to have access to it to do … stuff …

Dubious legality type … stuff …

With the amount of credit and debit card fraud being reported in the media, I’m sure you can see my point.

So, when we’re replacing our computers hard drive we want to make sure the personal information on it – including those rather valuable bank details – aren’t accessible to criminals, crooks and fraudsters.

Let me give you a case in point.

A few years ago, the BBC decided to get hold of some second hand hard drives – from Nigeria, I seem to recall – to see how easily traceable a person was, from the data left on a junked drive. The reporter bought a second hard drive from a dealer in Nigeria, and was able to recover the previous owners home address, bank details, and other bits and bobs from it.

And then turned up on the unfortunate prior owner’s front door step, to ask him what he thought about it.

I recognised the chap; – it was one of the regulars at the pub I was working at, at the time; a cabbie called Ted. Who was, in his own words, gobsmacked to find out how easily doable it was to get all he, and his families, details from the recovered disc.

Now, admittedly, the BBC used what, at the time was fairly pricey forensic hard drive recovery service to get to the info.

But given that the technology for doing this sort of thing will get more available as time goes by and that the article itself was written some three years ago, well …

So we can see that some basic techniques will become more and more important as time goes by. I can only compare it to making sure you don’t leave you wallet in your car, when you sell it to a second hand car dealer …

Or leaving your front door keys in the lock, when you go shopping …

Little things like that

Which is wear things like Disc Utility come in handy.

One thing we can do – indeed should do, if we’re disposing of our old computer, rather than selling it on – is to literally destroy the hard drive.

Putting a screwdriver or hammer through is generally considered a good idea.

But if you’re planning to sell the drive, or the computer, on eBay, something like that?

Then wiping the drive as thoroughly as possibly is usually the answer.

For some time, Apple have included Disc Utility with Mac OS X. It’s OS X’s all-in-one software tool for formatting a hard-drive when you wish to install an operating system.

Or partitioning an exterior drive into separate sections.

Or do all of the same, to a USB flash drive, CD, or DVD.

Just as importantly, you can also use it to it to wipe a drive. It’s got a trio of options, when needed.

It can do a quick erase of the free space on the drive. The next level up will erase the drive by writing zeros over the data, generally agreed to be reasonably secure. However, Disc Utility can also do a 7-pass erase, which writes zeros over the space seven times, or a 35-times pass, which writes zeros over the space, thirty-five times. Something of an overnight job, but also one that’s generally considered very secure. And as I recall Spencer Kelly, presenter of BBCNews24’s “Click” saying at the time, reputedly secure enough to stop the Pentagon recovering the data that had been on there.

My point is this; I think we all need to take basic precautions, and this, for me, strikes me as one.

I also know that it’s a route not available to Windoze user’s, out of the box, although I’m told fdisc is available, but not the easiest one to use.

However, I’d suggest those of us that need to check out Source Forge, the open source directory, for some useful stuff. The link to that is on my Links page, but you can also find it here.

But if you’re reading my blog, and know of a good app, please, feel free to leave a comment and a link.