Greetings all, I am curious if anyone knows why utilities such as 'GNU shred' (part of coreutils) and 'wipe' say they are not effective on journalled file systems- especially EXT3. Is it because you can't "guarantee" that the journal has been flushed/wiped (i.e. you have the journal 'between' you and the actual data blocks on the physical disk), or because of buffering, or some other reason? On the same note, does anyone know of any utility that does overwrite EXT3? Most specifically, I am Looking for an open source utility that will do a MULTIPLE-pass overwrite of any data blocks used by a file. (This is for a government related project and DOD says it's not sufficient to just do a single overwrite of all zero's). Any help/pointers are greatly appreciated. Thanks. Below is an excerpt from the shred man page which specifically mentions EXT3: ---- CAUTION: Note that shred relies on a very important assumption: that the filesystem overwrites data in place. This is the traditional way to do things, but many modern filesystem designs do not satisfy this assumption. The following are examples of filesystems on which shred is not effective: * log-structured or journaled filesystems, such as those supplied with AIX and Solaris (and JFS, ReiserFS, XFS, Ext3, etc.) ---- _______________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today! http://vote.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Ext3-users@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/ext3-users