Needless to say, I'm now hoping that someone knows of a good alternative to Blancco with roughly the same cost (I can't currently afford to shell out a huge lump sum for a license at this early stage of my business) and the same ability to create a 'tamperproof digitally-signable PDF certificate of erasure'. How it isn't considered fraud on the part of a software company to consider a software license consumed without the software actually having fulfilled its advertised purpose is beyond me, but it's the most extortionate business model I've ever seen.

I had actually read that link before their technical team emailed me it, but I hadn't taken the additional jump of assuming that a 'started erasure' includes a completely failed one - but Blancco's technical team were happy to put me straight about this. If you need to erase more computers, you will need to purchase additional licenses. Even if the erasure is cancelled after starting it, the license will still be lost. Sure that this was a bug I contacted Blancco Ltd, and while I can provide the whole email exchange, the gist of it was this link to their Knowledge Base, which states:Īfter the erasure has been started the license is consumed.

Here is the erasure certificate proving that not a single byte of the drive was wiped.

In other words, the license was considered 'used' even when exactly 0% of the drive had been wiped with it. However, after buying a licence to test with the other day and having it completely fail to wipe the specified drive (you pay ~£20 for a licence that allows for one drive to be wiped), I noticed that the licence I bought had been consumed. I'm a few weeks away from starting my own business securely wiping drives, targeting enterprises as well as individuals, so I needed a data-wiping solution for the enterprise segment that would allow me to wipe drives while providing the 'tamperproof digitally-signable PDF certificate of erasure' that Blancco provides by default (consumers or business customers not requiring such a certificate have their drives manually zeroed or firmware-erased).

Blancco drive eraser review