Secure File Deletion

[Jim Laughlan]

Not to diss the article in anyway, but I'm just wondering how well these secure delete programs really work. My training always told me the only secure hard drive is one that is destroyed physically.

http://www.maketecheasier.com/perma...letter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=10032015

 

[danamyles]

Very informative, th Jim

 

[JD P]

Not to diss the article in anyway, but I'm just wondering how well these secure delete programs really work. My training always told me the only secure hard drive is one that is destroyed physically.

http://www.maketecheasier.com/perma...letter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=10032015

The US Govt requires physical destruction. With the recent release that the NSA was able to alter HDD firmware, I think that is the best idea.

However, for most home users just trying to keep their financial and emails from getting found, running a single random number as the "if" for dd with the "of" set to the entire device and appropriate blocksize is more than enough.

I've been cleaning up previously removed files using a simple script before I travel for years.
$ ./wipe-free-space.sh

#!/bin/bash
dd if=/dev/zero of=zero.small.file bs=1024 count=102400
dd if=/dev/zero of=zero.file bs=1024
sync ; sleep 60 ; sync
rm zero.small.file
rm zero.file

The trick is to run from a directory where the userid has write privileges since the CWD is used. If there are multiple partitions, running it on each is necessary. The count in the first dd may need to be increased on larger partitions. The goal is to fill up the empty partition area with zeros.

 

[ryanvade]

oh not this again:
http://www.linux.org/threads/how-can-i-wipe-files-or-partitions-in-linux.7624/