SHRED for EXT3?

Michael Hennebry hennebry at web.cs.ndsu.nodak.edu
Thu Jul 28 04:54:06 UTC 2005


On Wed, 27 Jul 2005, Robert Nichols wrote:

> The 'shred' program overwrites the file in a manner that does not
> reallocate the space.  You can also do that with 'dd' if you use
> the "conv=notrunc" option.  A single overwrite is sufficient to
> prevent anyone without the resources of certain three-letter
> government agencies from recovering the data, so there's little

man shred
...
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.)

-- 
Mike   hennebry at web.cs.ndsu.NoDak.edu
"There are three kinds of people,
those who can count and those who can't."




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