Good software to delete my personal files

[DannySmit]

Hey all, I was wondering whether anyone could advice some good free sotware which I could download - I need to clean uo my work laptop from my personal files. Thanx!

[John R. Graham]

Moved from Other Things Gentoo to Off the Wall. Not about Gentoo so it fits better here.

- John
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[MustrumR]

[Prenj]

http://blog.kadiraltan.com/disk-wiping-dd-and-devrandom/

[aidanjt]

man shred(1), is part of coreutils on Linux. If you don't want to be left at the mercy of the filesystem, then you're going to have to go though a bit more effort to calculate the sector range(s) of the file and zero with dd and seek with the raw disk and count to stop at the end of file, although that's very very risky if you don't know what you're doing, so just stick with shred.
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[energyman76b]

[NotQuiteSane]

Nuke it from orbit.

NQS
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These opinions are mine, mine I say! Piss off and get your own.

As I see it -- An irregular blog, Improved with new location

To delete French language packs from system use 'sudo rm -fr /'

[djdunn]

professional data recovery people hear dd and give up before they start
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Now, with penguins, (cuddly such), "contented" means it has either just gotten laid, or it's stuffed on herring. Take it from me, I'm an expert on penguins, those are really the only two options.

--Linus Torvalds

[Mardok45]

[energyman76b]

[Mardok45]

[wildhorse]

The best way to wipe your personal files is: store them with Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office.

[energyman76b]

[BoneKracker]

[energyman76b]

you might read some of the links I posted. Or google yourself.

Overwritting once defeats even professional tools.
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[BoneKracker]

[BoneKracker]

[energyman76b]

[BoneKracker]

That's nice. He may be an "expert", but the Manning case this year reveals that the U.S. Army can recover data from single-pass zero-wiped disk.

But unless you're likely to have the determined efforts of a such an organization applied against you, I'd agree that anything more than a single-pass random-data write is overkill.

More often, what screws people is that they've shredded a file, but don't realize that copies of it existed in various other locations, such as tmp files, mail spools, swap space, etc.

As I've said many times before, the only way to really be safe is to use Tin Hat Linux (based on Gentoo Hardened and running entirely in RAM), wait five minutes after shutting down the computer before releasing physical control of it (or yank the RAM), and store any persistent data on a heavily-encrypted USB flash stick which you keep deep in your ass (deeper than the length of a grown man's fingers).
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Oldthinkers unbellyfeel INGSOC.
-- Headline of a document on Winston Smith's terminal in his cubicle at the Ministry of Truth, seen briefly in the background in one scene of the movie rendition of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

[pjp]

[BoneKracker]

If you're going to keep it in there a long time, you swallow it instead, with a 30-foot-long string, tied to one of your rear molars. Then, when you shit it out, you untie the string from your mouth and pull on it, pulling the flash drive back up into your ass the appropriate distance, tie the string off to your rear molar again, and trim off the excess string in your mouth. When you need it, you just untie the string and wait a few hours.

It's the only way to be sure. If you're really worried enough to be concerned whether you need to overwrite data one vs many times, then you must also be worried enough to this this.
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Oldthinkers unbellyfeel INGSOC.
-- Headline of a document on Winston Smith's terminal in his cubicle at the Ministry of Truth, seen briefly in the background in one scene of the movie rendition of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

[sikpuppy]

Does the US military still shoot wiped hard drives? That would make it fairly unlikely that the data would ever be recovered, I would imagine. A bolt gun would do the trick as well one would think.

As for recovery after a single pass, that would depend on how sensitive you could make the read of the data. There may still be a magnetic image of the previous data faintly on the platters, but the heads would have to be calibrated differently (in a fashion analogous to the refocussing of the laser on a dual layered DVD).

So, if you are a criminal and you don't want the Man to get you, shoot the crap out of old data and just install a new hard drive.

[BoneKracker]

I've never heard of anybody shooting disks, except for the fun of it, to see what happens. If I really, really wanted to be ultra-ridiculously safe (like if a disk had the means to wipe out the human race on it), I'd take an arc-welder to the platters.

When I get rid of an old computer, I just use DBAN on the drives, which happens to be on my bootable SystemRescueCD USB flash drive (which is Gentoo-based but not up my ass). It also has some nice tools for low-level disk repair, along with a butt-load (no pun intended) of other utilities.
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Oldthinkers unbellyfeel INGSOC.
-- Headline of a document on Winston Smith's terminal in his cubicle at the Ministry of Truth, seen briefly in the background in one scene of the movie rendition of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

[energyman76b]

[John R. Graham]

This is the longest time I've seen a probable proto-spammer played with without gladiators or Turkish prisons being mentioned.

- John
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