Can anyone please explain the differences in wipe modes...
take a look here:
Zero Fill: Overwrites all sectors with repeating ‘00’.
Random Character Fill: Overwrites all sectors with mathematically-generated “random” characters. Some applications will allow you to introduce “entropy” or more “randomness” via mouse movements or keystrokes.
Any Character Fill: Depending on application parameters, typically allows the user to chose a character for overwrite (as opposed to zero or random).
US Gov Standard: Zero Fill, seven (7) iterations or passes.
Iterations is the number of times wiped, also called “passes.”
Just FYI, there are a lot of differing opinions about how many times a file should be wiped to be securely deleted. If the application is thorough - it gets slack space, primary & secondary MFT entries, restore points, temp files, registry entries, etc - one overwrite is plenty. In reality no one is going to recover the file.
The problem is that most (if not all) applications are not as thorough as one might desire, and leave artifacts behind. This would afford the opportunity to potentially recover data through detailed forensic analysis. In that scenario, it won’t matter how many overwrites you use, because the deletion is only as thorough as the application that did it…
LM
Say then US Gov Standard is selected with 1 Iteration; will CSC automatically go through the hd 7 times as per the standard?