hey guys,

tomorrow my provider will shutdown my old server. enough reason for me to wipe clean my sensitive data. but how? i was looking around and found some possible solutions [1,2]:

1. srm – securely remove files or directories
2. wipe – securely erase files from magnetic media
3. shred – overwrite a file to hide its contents, and optionally delete it

i’ve decided to use shred. the next thing i have to look after was my ext3 mount option. my luck – it was the default value: “data=ordered”, so shred would work properly! unfortunately shred isn’t able to remove directories, so it was necessary to tweak a little bit. here is the final command [3]:

find -type f -execdir shred -ufzv -n8 {} +

and if you want to remove the current directory and show the others, here we are:

find -type f -execdir shred -ufzv -n8 {} + && rm -rf `pwd` && cd .. && ls -l | grep ^d

hopefully the “bad” guys at my provider won’t get my files now

[1] Linux : How to delete file securely
[2] Free Secure File and Disk Deletion Utilities
[3] How to shred entire directory (tree)