a word of CAUTION with REDundead

[Mark L. Pederson]

Just a word of caution for RENTAL HOUSES - we tested the REDundead app at various stages and it is SO GOOD at recovering R3D files that in most cases it will also recover PREVIOUS RECORDED CLIPS from past jobs.

So ... if you are a RENTAL HOUSE - you REALLY, REALLY, REALLY need to do a secure erase on your media before renting - if you don't - you are risking the security of your previous clients work - and in feature films with A-list actors this is serious business -

You can write zero's across your media in disc utility.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Excellent point, Mark! I've been thinking about this too this morning. I'm actually about doing some testing right now. I've got a RED-RAM, RED Drive and a handful of CF cards sitting here, going to wipe them in a few different ways and play with recovering files.

I shoot a lot of government projects, some requiring heightened security clearances, etc.. For such jobs, I already zero out the media and/or shoot to cheaper LEXAR cards as some DOD and DHS tasks mandate the media be handed over or even destroyed anyway.

[david farland]

I guess the most important thing is what utilities (Mac/PC) are suggested for TOTAL media erase....and just to make the issue more complex, not just REDunDead proof but any recovery utility.
D

[Casey Green]

Funny how a File Recovery app prompts the need for a File Destruction app. :-)

[Eirik Tyrihjel]

So how do we erase a disk securely (except of course, filling it up, either by recording with the RED ONE or by dropping 320 Gb (or 8Gb, 16Gb whatevre media is used) on to it)?

[Jason Diamond]

write zero's across the whole disk and then try to recover the files. you can use disk utility that comes with OS X if on a Mac.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Disk Utility on OSX in Applications>Utilities will do an erase. It provides 3 levels of security, the single-pass level 1 is good enough it seems. I have used that to zero a RED-RAM and have not been able to recover from it after. Took several hours to zero the RED-RAM, so be aware that it's not an instant process. Can also be used as "diskutil" from the command line via terminal.

I did a format in WinXP on a RED-Drive (not a quick format) and that seems to have taken care of it too.

[Stephen Gentle]

Won't zeroing out a drive every time it goes out for rental possibly reduce its life span quite a lot?

[jbeale]

Won't zeroing out a drive every time it goes out for rental possibly reduce its life span quite a lot?

It's just another file write. Doesn't cause any more wear than would filling up the media with normal R3D files.

[Stephen Gentle]

It's just another file write. Doesn't cause any more wear than would filling up the media with normal R3D files.

That's the point though - it would be like using the drive twice as much, which would lead to a reduced life span - possibly up to half for the RED RAM (if you fill it up to 100% capacity then erase) given that SSDs only have a limited amount of write cycles (between 1,000 and 100,000 per block depending on the type of memory). It's probably not as bad for hard drives, but they do eventually fail mechanically...