There is still no guarantee that the overwriting is actually taking place over the region of the hard drive that you need it to obliterate the file of interest. The secure-delete commands try to overcome the best efforts of journaling filesystems and to succeed in overwriting the file securely. RELATED: Why You Can't 'Securely Delete' a File, and What to Do Instead The secure-delete Suite

But don’t make the mistake of thinking that the data is definitely gone and is totally irrecoverable. If all you’re after some peace of mind that the files have been deleted a bit more thoroughly than rm would have done it, then shred is probably fine.

And with journaling filesystems, there’s no guarantee that the overwriting is actually taking place over the hard drive space used by the deleted file. Modern journaling file systems such as ext3 and ext4 go to tremendous efforts to ensure they don’t break, become corrupt, or lose data. Shred has no recursive option, so it cannot be used to erase directory trees of nested directories.Īs good as shred is, there’s an issue. The remaining files are each processed by shred in turn. The * represents multiple characters, and the ? represents a single character. This command would delete all of the remaining “Preliminary_Notes” files in the current working directory. Wildcards can be used with shred to select groups of files to be erased. RELATED: You Only Need to Wipe a Disk Once to Securely Erase It Shredding Multiple FIles But is it less secure? Three passes, interestingly, is probably more than enough. To get three passes in total, we request an extra two passes: shred -uvz -n 2 Preliminary_Notes.txt_02.txtįewer passes-fewer shreddings if you like- is obviously faster. So shred will always do one more pass than the number we ask for. The number we provide here is the number of extra passes we require shred to perform. We can ask shred to use more or fewer overwrite passes by using the -n (number) option.

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