On Nov 09, 2002 13:42 -0500, Skylar Thompson wrote: > On the wipe website, this caveat is mentioned: > > 3. you're wiping a file in a log structured file system or > any FS that doesn't overwrite the file's previously allocated > sectors or the drive has reassigned one or more sectors due to error > > I'm not an expert on filesystems, but "log structured file system" sounds > like a journaled filesystem, so I'm not confident that wipe will work on > Ext3. Another utility for deleting securely, shred, says that it is very > difficult to delete securely on a journaled filesystem. No, "log structured" filesystems are different than journaled filesystems. A log structured filesystem, like "Tux 2" or reiser4 will not overwrite any part of an old file, but rather allocate blocks in a free part of the disk and write the new data there before marking the old disk blocks free. That makes it difficult to overwrite files as you delete them and instead you have to go with an "overwrite all the free parts of the disk" kind of system. For journaled filesystems, you might still "worry" a bit about data in the journal (if using data=journal mode, or in other rare cases), but the journal is constantly being overwritten so it is usually not a big issue. Cheers, Andreas -- Andreas Dilger http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2resize/ _______________________________________________ Ext3-users@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/ext3-users
