Destroying Data on Retrospect Backup Members

[ericmurphy]

I need to retire a hard disk I was using for Retrospect backups, but I don't want to dispose of it until I'm sure sensitive financial data on it is unrecoverable. Retrospect uses DES encryption, which I understand is not considered to be totally secure, but I believe it's good enough for my purposes (it's not like there are military secrets on the drive). My question is, does Retrospect encrypt the actual data, or just the catalog information? In other words, not knowing the password for the backup set, is it practical to try to recover the Retrospect data?

[Lennart_T]

Quote:

---

I need to retire a hard disk I was using for Retrospect backups, but I don't want to dispose of it until I'm sure sensitive financial data on it is unrecoverable.

 

---

Try a sledgehammer. (Yes, I'm serious).

 

If you got time, use Apple's Disk Utility and erase the drive with either a 7-pass or 35-pass erase option. (And THEN use the sledgehammer).

[ericmurphy]

Kind of what I thought. Since the drive is currently bare (i.e., no firewire interface), the sledgehammer might be the best option.

 

But more generally, my question remains: is the data in a Retrospect backup set member encrypted? Yes, I'm aware that DES has been cracked, but I'm not sure anyone is going to waste the processor resources to crack the encryption on some random HD they find in a dumpster somewhere.

[RonaldL]

I've heard good things about DBAN and it looks like there's a Macintosh version: http://dban.sourceforge.net/ppc.html