| Weblog: | Please, For the Love of All That's Recoverable, Shred Your Hard Drive! | |
| Subject: | Great | |
| Date: | 2005-03-02 12:13:25 | |
| From: | myc18 | |
| Great tip. Knoppix Hacks is an incredible book. But what is the difference between this technique and the US Department of Defense disk clearing and sanitizing standard DoD 5220.22-M ("Overwrite all addressable locations with a character, its complement, then a random character and verify")? | ||
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Great
2005-03-02 12:38:40 Kyle Rankin |
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| Showing messages 1 through 1 of 1. |
The primary difference between shred and the DoD standard is that shred writes a random character on all passes (except for the last pass if you use -z) instead of just the last pass. Two passes of dd the first writing a one, the second a zero, followed up by shred -n 1 would perform the DoD method. The idea behind the shred method is that since each write is random, it's more difficult to piece together legitimate data after the fact.