[ale] Secure drive wipes on ext4 file system?

Jim Kinney jim.kinney at gmail.com
Thu Dec 11 09:56:12 EST 2014


The journal will get hammered during the shred run so it's OK.

However, SSD drives move sectors for wear leveling and disable sectors in
that process. So there are some sectors with real data that are no longer
accessible by normal read/write processes that can be accessed by clever
people and 3-letter organizations. Thumb drives are in this category except
the really cheap ones.
To ensure the data is useless on those "lost" sectors, encryption is
required.
On Dec 11, 2014 9:34 AM, "Raj Wurttemberg" <rajaw at c64.us> wrote:

> I have external USB drives that I need to do a secure wipe on regularly. I
> have been using the 'shred' command but I just read that shred does not
> really work will on journaling file systems.
>
> The only other think I can think of is to do a manual 'dd' to the drive to
> write over every single sector.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Kind regards,
> /Raj
>
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