Greg Wooledge <g...@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.