SHRED for EXT3?

[Mike McCarty]

Tony Nelson wrote:
> At 1:33 PM -0500 7/27/05, Mike McCarty wrote:
>  ...
> 
>>I have since gotten an external USB drive, and put all subsequent
>>stuff belonging to them on it. They paid for that, and so I can
>>just return that. But it also has some of my stuff on it, which
>>I'd like to wipe. Obviously, I cannot hammer their drive. But if
>>I just buy an identical one, and copy either their stuff or my
>>stuff to it, then I'm still stuck with how to erase the data
>>on one of the drives.
> 
> 
> When you have the two identical USB drives, tar up your stuff, set the
> tarball aside on your main drive, delete that stuff, and copy their stuff
> to the new drive.  Erase the old drive, copy their stuff back to the old
> drive, and send it to them.  Erase the new drive and unpack your tarball to
> it.  Note that by "erase" I speak of a low-level format operation.

Nice idea. Unfortunately, I'd have to purchase *two* new drives to
do that. My "main" drive isn't big enough to hold all the stuff on
the USB drive. But it's certainly worth thinking about...

I suppose I could tar w/compression my stuff, run split, and
write it off to CDs, recover that back to the new drive, and check.
If it worked, then reformat the new drive, and copy their stuff
to it. Reformat the old drive, and copy their stuff to it. Reformat
the new drive, and restore my stuff from CD. This way, I'd be
able to return the exact drive they purchased. My stuff is much
smaller than theirs, so even with two copies and reformatting,
it's probably faster to copy their stuff back and forth, and
certainly would use fewer CDs.

Hmm, even my stuff is 25G.

Mike
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