Securely delete files...

[Atom Smasher]

On Thu, 21 Aug 2008, Faramir wrote:

>  That's is what I am no longer sure I can do, I mean, it seems I can 
> tell the disk "overwrite that file", and the disk can write somewhere 
> else, not over the sectors containing the file I want to "destroy" (at 
> least, that is what I have understood from this thread). But maybe there 
> is some app capable of telling the disk "write this random patter right 
> over the place where the original file is, and not in other places".
===================

that's basically what sfill (part of the srm package from thc) does, per 
partition. the other way of doing basically the same thing:
   dd if=/dev/urandom of=/partition/tmp-file ; rm /partition/tmp-file

although sfill also scrubs the inodes, IIRC. that would make it hard to 
figure out the [former] names and [former] locations of the scrubbed 
files.

repeat as necessary.

of course that's no substitute for strapping high explosives to the hard 
drive and blasting pieces of the platter into orbit, which it seems some 
people on this list would consider the only acceptable solution ;)


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