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Forum Discussion
Securely delete NAS data before resale
Hello All,
I am an owner of a Netgear ReadyNAS 10400. Although the NAS has served me well i have outgrown its capacity and now must say farewell to it, this will probably be by means of eBay.
What i want to do is erase all my data securely and permanently before doing this. I have factory reset the device but not yet confident the data is truly gone and can’t be recovered with someone with some knowhow. Could anyone advise the best and easiest way to do this ? Is there any on-device way to do it i might of missed ? Its only personal data on the device; home photos, documents and the such.
4 Replies
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Hi Nasfandago
Welcome to the Community!
Doing a Factory reset permanently deletes your data and should not be recoverable. If you are still worried that someone might be able to recover some of it you may want to try using 3rd part apps like one on this article. There is also cipher command on windows cmd prompt.
Not including the disks is also one option IMO.
Note that any 2nd hand/refurbished NETGEAR Product loses it's Hardware Warranty and Support. Only the original purchaser is eligible for that.
Hope this helps!
Regards
Marc_V wrote: "Not including the disks is also one option IMO."
True. Sell box and disks separately (second best) or sell the box and destroy the disks mechanically (100% secure). With the latter you could be very creative (some examples): 1) Impact it using a sledge hammer 2) Drill some holes through it 3) Burn it beyond 1000°K 4) Dump it into butyric acid for a few days etc. Of course, you could apply 1) to 4) on it sequentially to be absolutely safe.
Kind regards
Thanks for the reply Mark. Do you know if 'Doing a Factory reset permanently deletes your data' does anything technical to ensure that ? Such as writing blank data over my old data ? Certainly could look to use 3rd party software in another PC to do that but was hoping NetGear already did something like this to save that hassle.
I might sell the drives separately as suggested. As the drives have some value I’m not wanting to physically destroying them at this time, as fun as it sounds.
Nasfandago wrote:
Do you know if 'Doing a Factory reset permanently deletes your data' does anything technical to ensure that ? Such as writing blank data over my old data ?
It will reformat the drives, but that might not fully erase your user data. So it is conceivable that RAID recovery tools like ReclaiMe could find some of it.
I believe cipher assumes ntfs formatting, so it's not a good tool for this. In particular, it might not encrypt free space. I suggest using the write-zeros tools in lifeguard or seagate.
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