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Clarification on HD wiping during reimage

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Hello All-

I am hoping for some clarification surrounding whether or not Acronis Snap Deploy 5 completely erases the hard drive of the destination machine during a reimage.

We have some machines that we'll be deploying a new image to that may contain confidential data, and I am wondering if I need to first perform a wipe on the machines, or if Acronis by its nature does so during deployment.

Thanks!

-David

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It does not, unless you do a sector-by-sector backup when creating your image and then do a sector-by-sector recovery as well.  Even then, that would be a one time write process and not considered secure by most standards. 

If you need to wipe drives securely/quickly, I'd recommend getting a hard drive dock that can do physical clone and wipe.  We purchased a 5 drive Kanguru (a bit expensive), but well worth it's price in time and clone and wipe capabilties of physical disks if you do this a lot in your work environment.  We also can clone encrypted drives with this as long as teh drives are of the same size and being installed in the same hardware again (https://store.kanguru.com/products/kanguruclone-7hd-sata-pro-hard-drive-duplicator)

Alternatively, you can get a cheap 2 bay clone/dock from Amazon (roughly $35), but they only do single pass wipes as well.  

Otherwise, if you need a secure wipe, then you can use the free mil-cert application "D-ban" (Darik's Boot and Nuke) to securely wipe drives before re-deploying.   

In reply to by truwrikodrorow…

Hi,

About he suggested app for erasing:

1. About Dban (free) will not tackle SSDs

2. The trial Blancco5Evaluation I downoaded - well I was not able to use it because the bootable USB that was automatically created just crashed after starting...

I got quite a good result with PartedMagic that, among other things, works quite OK.

CCleaner is free and has a disk wipe method.  Minitool free also has diskwipe - both work well. If you have to certify destruction though, these won't cut the mustard for legal in most cases though.  I'd feel confident doing this on my personal drives though.  

Those dual dock cloners / wipers do a good job too and for $30 are a bargain if you do this a lot.  Pop in 2 disks, hold the wipe button and let it do its thing while you do other stuff.  There are tons of them - this is just one example:https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-External-Duplicator-Function-EC-HDD2/dp/…

Been awhile since I used DBAN now, but I seem to remember it handling SSD's OK.  I stopped using it when they changed their licensing scheme for personal / business use and now have a new business product and haven't ever tried Blancco.