What different methods can be used to permanently erase everything on a VHS tape.?
You mean so that it can be re-used? Used to be, they made bulk magnetic erasers that you simply laid the tape on for several seconds on each side. Essentially, there were just good-szie electromagnets that realigned the magentic particles on the tape so that it would be blank again. Now that VHS is all but dead, there isn’t much market for such erasers. But if you have a VCR, every single one must, of necessity, have an erase head in it. You can’t re-record on a tape without first erasing it. So as you put a tape in the machine and hit Record, the tape travels past an erase head before it passes the recording heads. If you have no input signal, then you’re recording ‘nothingness’. Time-consuming, but effective. And there is no FBI or CIA device that will ever determine what was previously there.
