Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org> wrote:
Shred will determine the size of the file, then write data to the
file, rewind, write data again, etc. On a traditional hard drive,
that will overwrite the original private information. On modern
devices, it may not.
Thanks for the excellent explanation :)
One nitpick. You say "On a traditional hard drive, that will overwrite
the original private information" but that's not quite true. It also
needs to be a "traditional" file system! That is, not journalled or COW.
So nowadays I would expect shred not to work unless you got very
lucky, or planned carefully.