Re: Wiping USB drives

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]





On Sat, 14 Apr 2007 centos@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

On Sat, 14 Apr 2007 11:20:16 -0500 (CDT)
Barry Brimer <lists@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I have a dozen of drives, ranging from 10Gb to 200Gb. I want to
wipe them clean before donating them. I have a IDE/SATA to USB
converter that works. I can see the drives properly.

Depending on the filesystem on the drives, shred may be fine
"man shred" can tell you more.  You can also use
"cat /dev/random > /dev/devicename" as well.

I have looked at shred before asking, and it said:

The following are examples of file systems on which shred
is not effective, or is not guaranteed to be effective in
all file system modes:

* log-structured or journaled file systems, such as those supplied
with AIX and Solaris (and JFS, ReiserFS, XFS, Ext3, etc.)

As you did not mention the filesystem on your USB drives, I did not know whether or not shred would be effective for you.

It may or may not be reasonable to format the drives with vfat or ext2 and then run shred, which would add an additional layer of masking.

How secure is cat /dev/random > /dev/devicename ?

How secure? I can't really answer that. I have used at before for the same purpose (I usually run it 3 times) and then tried to recover files with no successful recoveries.

I am by no means an expert in this area, I am simply offering a few ideas.

Barry
_______________________________________________
CentOS mailing list
CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

[Index of Archives]     [CentOS]     [CentOS Announce]     [CentOS Development]     [CentOS ARM Devel]     [CentOS Docs]     [CentOS Virtualization]     [Carrier Grade Linux]     [Linux Media]     [Asterisk]     [DCCP]     [Netdev]     [Xorg]     [Linux USB]
  Powered by Linux