[ale] erasing ext3 filesystems securely

[tfreeman at intel.digichem.net]

On Mon, 6 Jun 2005, John Wells wrote:

> Guys,
> 
> After letting shred run for 20+ hours on the drive I plan to return to
> Circuit City, I finally bothered to read the man page (doh) and found the
> following relevant excerpt:
> ----
> 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.)
> ----
> 
> 
> So...that's down the tubes.  Trying to google for the subject line and
> other  combinations hasn't turned up any definitive sources either.
> 
> I don't need CIA level deletion here, but I would like to be reasonably 
> certain that noone could restore my data after the drive is returned.
> 
> Is there a utility out there that can handle ext3 deletion?
> 
> Thanks, as always.
> 

I don't know, but reformat the drive as something like a vfat, or ext2, 
neither of which are journaled, followed by shred should do the job.

Another idea might be to dd the raw device with zeros, or something from 
/dev/random.

I don't claim either will work, but I should think they would. YMMV of 
course.


> John
> 
> 
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> 

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