At 12:41 PM -0500 7/27/05, Mike McCarty wrote: >I don't want to lose *my own data*. I'd like a version of >shred (or something like it) which will "permanently >eradicate" the data in some files. These files are >(intentionally, and with this in mind) located in a few >isolated directories (and their sub-directories). ISTM that neither Ext3 nor Ext2 are well suited for this application. It would be better to have a separate volume (any FS you want) that can be entirely erased at the end of the project. As a practical matter, just writing over the partition and swap will be good enough. If you need more security, use an encrypting filesystem, but still erase it at the end. In the old days of MacOS, one could use a Disk Image, a file that could be treated as a volume, and mounted just by clicking on it. But the HFS(+) filesystem didn't jounal writes, and the entire volume was (usually) a preallocated file, so you knew where the data was, and what to erase. Ahh, the old days. Using the *nix equivalent, loopback devices (man losetup), probably won't help at all here, as the writes to the underlying file would be journalled. There are settings to Ext3 that are supposed to control what is journalled, but I wouldn't want to depend on them for legal matters. I have more confidence in partition tables not moving around much. ____________________________________________________________________ TonyN.:' <mailto:tonynelson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> ' <http://www.georgeanelson.com/>
