Secure shredding program suggestions

[Monty67]

Hello.

Given the amount of personal data that gets stored on a hdd I always use Erasor on the windows machines to "hopefully" secure the drive before reusing it. For linux I've read about the following but sadly they are not available in gslapt

shred
srm
smem

Just to name a few.
Any suggestions that are in gslapt?

thanks for the help

[sgla1]

I have used "boot and nuke".  It's a bootable disk wipe utility.  See http://www.dban.org/

[Monty67]

thanks for the suggestion. I'll look into it.

[EyesOnly]

Hi Monty!

What desktop are you running in VL? I know you've mentioned it in other threads seems so but I've since forgotten, sorry. If you were running the KDE desktop and managed to install Krusader, which is an awesome dual-pane file manage leagues beyond XFE (yet I still prefer XFE myself), highlighting and right-clicking a file in there gives the option to "shred" the file. Now whether or not it does full-blown directories as well I can't recall ATM---I'd have to go boot into my other distro which has KDE to see.

Hmm... come to think of it? If you're running VL and have just the default XFCE desktop? If it's the version containing K3b in it for burning CDs/DVDs then chances are very high you could run Krusader without getting too deeply into Dependency Hell as you should already have the basic KDElibs along with qt3.3.8 installed to run K3b, see? Just a thought anyway.

And that's my take on the situation without nuking the entire drive with endless 0's and 1's.

Amicalement/Cheers!

Eyes-Only
"L'Peau-Rouge"

[overthere]

good thread..I was looking for the same...eraser would erase or 35xoverwrite all unused space on the drive includeing vacant clusters so you could give the unit away without a reinstall and most programs for viewing /recovering deleted files would find nothing...Dban bootNnuke seems to work for entire drives..wonder how many times overwrite is "shred"

[bigpaws]

The default on shred is 25.

You can change that.

Bigpaws

[sgla1]

Overthere, you are correct that dban bootNnuke is for wiping entire drives so they can be re-used safely (safe for the previous user, anyway).  You can specify the number of passes, air it's pretty flexible and will do a mil-spec wipe if you tell it to.

Cheers,

[wcs]

Shred also works for entire drives and seems to do a good job.
For great security, go for "shred -vuz /dev/hda".
(although the 25 passes might take a very long time...)

[Andy Price]

If you want something small and simple then srm should fit the bill. Although it's not in the reps it's a tiny download and installs without fuss. Just use it instead of the rm command. It can overwrite files or folders multiple times with the -D switch. My guess is that unless you are giving your hard drive to someone extremely clever your data should be safe.

Andy

[StrayBit]

I'm always worried when I reinstall my VL, or installing a new version, that it will pick up my previous mistakes.  And they are many!    Even changing from that new xfs () to reiser didn't work! 

It sounds like one of these might do the job?