On Tue, 2004-03-23 at 18:18, Christopher K. Johnson wrote: > Marc Schwartz wrote: > > > I have various procedures here that I utilize before sending any > > > >magnetic media anywhere. While nothing short of melting down the hard > >disk platters would provide near absolute erasure, I am comfortable in > >the notion that I take reasonable and appropriate measures to properly > >handle PHI (protected health information). > > > > > If you want to wipe out individual files, or individual partitions > securely, take a gander at 'man shred'. Shred is installed in a default > FC1 install by the coreutils package. Note that the --remove option is > necessary to delete a file afterwards. Chris, There is also 'wipe' at http://wipe.sourceforge.net/ and THC-SecureDelete at http://www.thc.org/releases.php. Some of the things that one needs to consider, among others, is the fact that the data may be found in other locations on your disk, such as the swap space, file slack space and elsewhere. One also has to consider the impact of disk caching and other similar factors. If you want to go just a wee bit further, visit: http://www.semdirect.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/239 If one is motivated to get a better feel for some of the issues pertaining to the erasure of data from magnetic media, there is a great paper by Peter Guttman from the University of Auckland here: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html Get a cup of coffee and enjoy... ;-) HTH, Marc Schwartz
