I am running Mysql5 on a Windows Xp machine on NTFS . I want to permanently delete a database containing sensitive data such that when the operating system is not active it is not possible to use raw disk editors and recovery tools to view and recover data that the operating system has deallocated(after dropping tables etc). How can I do this ?
2 Answers
You can use SDelete, a free tool from Microsoft. This can either securely delete a file or cleanse all the free space on a partition.
If you want a GUI, Eraser is an alternative.
Judging from the MySQL documentation for InnoDB and MyISAM, the relevant files to delete are ibdata, *.IBD, and *.FRM for an InnoDB database, and the *.FRM, *.MYD, and *.MYI files for MyISAM.
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sdelete is good.. does anyone know if Eraser is multi-threaded? i delete Mysql dbs using drop command. how to do this using sdelete?– icemanCommented Nov 17, 2009 at 11:58
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The only solution I know of is to overwrite all free space on the disk after the deletion.
Repeatedly copying small files till the disk is full, then deleting them would work.
As would have a script output '1'
until the drive is full.
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not directly. I've written bash, batch, and C programs to do the above:
while(true) echo 1;
– warrenCommented Nov 16, 2009 at 4:28