a little bit paranoid

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 :roll:

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

1 thought on “a little bit paranoid

  1. Matthias F.

    You should have encrypted the harddisk, then you wouldn’t have to think about erasing the data. Just about forgetting the key…

    Reply

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