Missing Link

What do you do when you’re finished with a document on your computer and need or want to get rid of it?   For most people the answer is to delete the file.  That is, after all, the most logical thing to do, right?   What a lot of people fail to realize is that simply deleting a file does NOT remove it from your hard drive.  A person skilled in data recovery can easily recover that data unless it has been overwritten several times.  Deleting the file only removes references to the file from the filesystem.  It does not physically remove the data from the drive, however, instead it just allows the computer to overwrite the space where it had been stored.

There are, however, ways you can securely delete files from your computer.  These tools will overwrite the space on the hard drive where the file resided,  usually 7 or more times (and often the number of passes is configurable).  This morning my boss brought to my attention the fact that one such utility is available by default on Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).   The command, srm, is used via the command line and will securely remove your files.

(continue reading…)

It should come as no surprise to anybody that I am an Apple fan. I use Mac’s almost exclusively (I do have a Windows 7 / Ubuntu Linux dual boot workstation in my home office…. along with a 24″ iMac ) and am sometimes very outspoken about the benefits of using Apple hardware and devices.

The reason for that is simple: for MOST things, and MOST people, Apple’s products just work.  And, when it doesn’t just work, it’s usually fairly easy to GET it to work.  It’s NOT perfect, and I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes it can be downright annoying when it doesn’t work. Overall, though, I find myself a whole lot less frustrated with Apple computers than I do PCs.

Apple just released late last week their latest upgrade to their venerable OS X lineup – OS X 10.6: Snow Leopard.  Many of the most important changes to the OS are under the hood and not easily seen by the average user, but will most definitely add significant performance improvements moving forward. There were a couple of things that were changed that had me excited – the most important of them being native support for Microsoft Exchange.

(continue reading…)