Originally posted here by nihil
Hi, fraggin

I can well believe it. A reasonably secure wiping sequence will use 0's 1's in a random sequence and intersperse with writes of random 0's and 1's.

If you repeatedly overwrite with the same character, it is relatively easy to unravel the overwrites.
Umm..."easy" being a relative term here. As in "spending tens of thousands of dollars and tasking tens-to-hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment and a technician or two for several months on imaging a hard drive, all for potentially zero benefit".

Much as I actually find Catch rather annoying, he or she is right on regarding the dramatics in this thread. While I disagree with Catch that a simple overwrite of a hard drive is a "high assurance" process (more like having a firewall on your network, rather than leaving it open to the world), few hard drives that weren't owned by those involved in espionage or international terrorism will ever be subjected to data-recovery techniques that a single overwrite pass with all zeros won't defeat.