1

I happen to know that formatting a disk even 10 times does not destroy everything. Is there a good shredding utility I can use on Linux ?

Improve this question
4
  • 2
    Zero-filling does. dd is enough for that.
    – Dennis
    Jan 26, 2013 at 0:16
  • Need to do it more than once. And even so data can be recovered. Use shred(1) on the disk. It also works on files, but not on COW-based filesystems like btrfs.
    – vonbrand
    Jan 26, 2013 at 7:56
  • 1
    I always scratch my head over posts like these. Not to many people have the equipment to read data that has been overwritten even once. And those that do are likely to get your data before you can erase it...
    – Keltari
    Jan 26, 2013 at 9:27
  • @Keltari: I hear you, but still it is good to know
    – statquant
    Jan 26, 2013 at 12:44

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
3

With conventional hard drives, a single wipe with zeros may be enough

The 'multiple wipes' method assumes that you're using older drives (with larger magnetic domains). The 'definitive' paper on data destruction by Guttmann suggests 35 different patterns - which are effective on different types of drives.

Guttmann suggests filling the drive with random data these days and a single wipe would do according to most. The shred command works for that.

The situation with SSDs is more muddied. Bell and Boddington at Murdoch University claim that the garbage collection on SSDs tends to overwrite deleted data in their paper. A team at the University of California claims the exact opposite, that nothing short of physical destruction works and that both ATA secure delete and shredding methods fail in most cases. Taking all this into account toolwise, you should consider shred (which does a high level secure wipe), and running a SATA secure wipe from HDparm if you can which is at lower level. That should handle most situations I believe. You should also consider encrypting any data worth deleting from the get go.

Improve this answer
3
  • Hi, thanks, I had a presentation from our departement of defense on computer security, I was amazed by the lack of security and how easy it was to hack un protected systems.
    – statquant
    Jan 26, 2013 at 9:08
  • This answers cites the Usenix paper on the faultiness of Secure Erase implementations and then goes on to recommend using Secure Erase. Further, shred does nothing that dd can't do, and neither are effective for wiping flash drives.
    – Hashim Aziz
    Dec 24, 2018 at 18:58
  • Gutman's paper has been widely misinterpreted. Gutman never actually said that those 35 patterns were necessary, only that he thought they were likely sufficient, given his speculations about how data retrieval might be possible - but he never cited any examples of it ever having been done. And there are sound reasons for believing that a single overwrite with random data is sufficient to wipe any hard drive of any technology.
    – Jamie Hanrahan
    Jan 5, 2019 at 6:32
2

For entire disks, there's the shred command, which by default only overwrites three times but with the -n <number> option can do as many passes as desired. It doesn't work so well on individual files in journaled filesystems, though. With the -z option, shred will do an extra pass with 0s afterward, so the shredding isn't immediately obvious.

Improve this answer
0

You can copy rubbish multiple times.

for i in `seq 1 35`; do
  dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdX
done
Improve this answer
8
  • That unnecessarily slow. See my answer to zero fill vs random fill.
    – Dennis
    Jan 26, 2013 at 1:12
  • @Dennis it's not that slower than zeroing the disk, and it provides a higher security level. If you are zeroing a disk, maybe 1 minute more or less won't really matter.
    – ssice
    Jan 26, 2013 at 2:44
  • It is much, much slower. On my machine, /dev/urandom takes 52 seconds to produce 1 GB of output. That's more than 14 hours for 1 TB, and 21 days for overwriting the disk 35 times. In comparison, zeroing a 1 TB hard drive once should take less than 3 hours (assuming 100 MB/s avg. write speed).
    – Dennis
    Jan 26, 2013 at 3:03
  • It's got no advantage over shred, though (both will deplete the entropy pool to some extent, this being the downside of random writes), and it's rather a lot more to type.
    – Darael
    Jan 26, 2013 at 18:10
  • @Darael Sure. Your answer and mine were more or less simultaneous, I didn't see yours. However, I don't think there's a need to downvote.
    – ssice
    Jan 26, 2013 at 18:13

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.