Show pagesourceBack to top Share via Share via... Twitter LinkedIn Telegram Yammer RedditRecent ChangesSend via e-MailPrintPermalink × Table of Contents Linux Tools HDDs large HDDs (>8TB) Windows Wipe hard drives Securely delete files and folders or whole file systems to hinder recovery, e.g. through means of computer forensics. Linux See also: Securely wipe disk (Arch Wiki) Tools nwipe – variety of recognised secure erase methods, fork of the dwipe command used by Darik's Boot and Nuke (dban). srm (secure remove) – version of rm tailored to overwrite files. HDDs fdisk -l # find out optimal I/O block size dd if=/dev/zero status=progress bs=512 of=/dev/disk/by-id/… Other tools which can help with secure delete of data on HDDs: badblocks -wsv -t random /disk/by-id/… large HDDs (>8TB) Since badblocks was originally written to verify floppy disks, its design isn’t construed for modern HDD drives. With sizes such as 18 TB drives, even the regular tip to use -b 4096 won’t help anymore. This is an alternative: Span a crypto layer above the device: cryptsetup open /dev/disk/by-id/FIND_OUT_WITH_LSBLK CHOOSE_A_NAME --type plain --cipher aes-xts-plain64 Fill the now opened decrypted layer with zeroes, which get written as encrypted data: shred -v -n 0 -z /dev/mapper/CHOSEN_NAME Compare fresh zeroes with the decrypted layer: cmp -b /dev/zero /dev/mapper/THE_NAME_YOU_CHOSE If it just stops with a message about end of file, the drive is fine. This method is also way faster than badblocks even with a single pass1. Windows Fastcopy can wipe and delete files as well. [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Badblocks#Alternatives Last modified: 2022-12-20 12:09