Does "Erase All Content And Settings" do a secure erase?

[Luba]

Does "Erase All Content And Settings" do a secure erase? If yes, what type? Random characters or zeros? And does it do it once or 3x, 7x? It takes about 2 hours to erase a 16Gb iPhone 3G so I am thinking it probably is a secure erase and perhaps it's doing 3x. I would think zero'ing out or random'ing out the data would take much less than 2 hours for one go-around since to zero out 200 Gb on a hard drive on a Mac only takes 40 minutes.

 

[-aggie-]

It's a secure erase with zeros, but how many times I have no idea.

 

[intrepid00]

It's a secure erase with zeros, but how many times I have no idea.

Unless you got state secerts where a goverment will throw thousands and thousands of dollars at your device to maybe pull of a few bits of info a single pass of 0 writes is good enough.

As for the erase all, it pretty much leaves the system drive alone so it isn't a complete wipe of 0s from start to finish.

 

[EarthDawn]

Unless you got state secerts where a goverment will throw thousands and thousands of dollars at your device to maybe pull of a few bits of info a single pass of 0 writes is good enough.

As for the erase all, it pretty much leaves the system drive alone so it isn't a complete wipe of 0s from start to finish.

Thats it in a nutshell

 

[aerodoc]

I don't think this is true for the 3GS. It just deletes a key code and is completed almost instantly. When I did it on the 3G it took a while since it actually erased data.

 

[sfditty]

I don't think this is true for the 3GS. It just deletes a key code and is completed almost instantly. When I did it on the 3G it took a while since it actually erased data.

This is my experience also, though I'm not sure if it's a 3G/3GS difference or a 2.x/3.x difference.

 

[Luba]

So a secure erase is not available on the 3GS or not available because of upgraded OS 3.1??

 

[aerodoc]

Secure erase is just different on the 3GS, that's all. It should not be called "erase" in my opinion since it really doesnt do that. But either way, you should feel confident someone else cannot recover the data.