Securely Delete files from Journaling Filesystems in Linux

Posted on March 5th, 2008 in Security by admin

I posted a tutorial on deleting files with wipe. But since ext3 is a journaling file system that wipe isn’t enough to securely delete files from people that have the tools/hardware to recover files, today I will show you how to delete a file that is unrecoverable to the best of my knowledge.. Read on if you like


WARNING: DO NOT RUN THESE POSIX COMMANDS UNLESS YOU ARE EXTREMELY CAREFUL

Issue these commands carefully

dd if=/dev/zero of=”file you want shreded”
sync
shred -u -v -n 5 “file you want shreded”
sync

Breaking it down, the commands say this:

* dd: “move data around”
* if=: “the input file is…”
* /dev/zero: “not a file at all, but a device that outputs an unending stream of zeros”
* of=: “and the output file is…”

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