[H-GEN] dd or shred for secure deletes.
Anthony Irwin
irwa82 at yahoo.com
Mon Nov 28 23:29:43 EST 2005
Hi,
I was under the impression that dd bs=1024 if=/dev/zero of=foo_file would securely delete a file by adding /0 to every byte of the file and the dd bs=1024 if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda would securely delete a hard drive.
I have however seen a web site that said that you should use a tool like shred because the method i mentioned above is not a secure way to delete files. Reading the man page of shred also said:
----------------------------
CAUTION: Note that shred relies on a very important assumption: that
the filesystem overwrites data in place. This is the traditional way
to do things, but many modern filesystem designs do not satisfy this
assumption. The following are examples of filesystems on which shred
is not effective:
* log-structured or journaled filesystems, such as those supplied with
AIX and Solaris (and JFS, ReiserFS, XFS, Ext3, etc.)
* filesystems that write redundant data and carry on even if some
writes
fail, such as RAID-based filesystems
* filesystems that make snapshots, such as Network Appliance's NFS
server
* filesystems that cache in temporary locations, such as NFS
version 3 clients
* compressed filesystems
In addition, file system backups and remote mirrors may contain copies
of the file that cannot be removed, and that will allow a shredded file
to be recovered later.
------------------------------------
So I was wondering if anyone knows the difference between the dd and shred methods of deleting files and hard drives and what the best way is.
Kind Regards,
Anthony Irwin
---------------------------------
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