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CLI Magic: Securely deleting files with shred

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HowTos

I used to think a simple format of a hard drive was enough to make data recovery impossible, but I was wrong. To ensure that details of your secret love affair, bank account passwords, and daily porn site visits cannot be recovered, use shred.

Deleting a file with the rm command merely adds a file's data blocks back to the system's free list. A file can be restored easily if its "freed" blocks have not been used again. shred repeatedly overwrites a file's space on the hard disk with random data, so even if a data recovery tool finds your file, it will be unreadable. By default, shred does not delete a file, but you can use the -u or --remove switch to delete it.

You can use shred on a file or entire partitions or disks, but you cannot use shred on the partition from which you are running it. In other words, if you have Ubuntu 5.10 installed on /dev/hda1, you cannot boot into it and run the command shred /dev/hda1. Instead, try using Knoppix or another live CD with shred if you wish to work on an entire partition.

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