Securely delete files...

[Atom Smasher]

On Fri, 22 Aug 2008, David Shaw wrote:

> OS X is an interesting case.  The standard filesystem, as you note, is 
> HFS+ with journaling.  Usually this is a danger sign for shredding as 
> the shred process doesn't know all the information it needs to do a 
> proper shredding job.  However, Apple has shredding built-in to OSX, and 
> since both the shredder and the filesystem come from the same people, 
> it's at least possible that they did the necessary work to have this 
> shred properly (i.e. in a journal-sensitive way).  Did they actually do 
> this?  I have no idea, and would be curious to hear from someone who 
> does have a reference on this one way or the other.  Apple tends to be 
> fairly stingy about this level of detail.
=================

test it!

fill a file with a few hundred copies of a random hash. as a control, 
delete the file the normal way and try to find it on the disk (i'd expect 
you can find it). repeat with a different hash, shred the file, and try 
again to find it on the disk.


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  762A 3B98 A3C3 96C9 C6B7 582A B88D 52E4 D9F5 7808
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