Shred feature - Shred feature information

Q & A for the old 2X Explorer file manager. For other topics, please use the corresponding forum.

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FarCry
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Post by FarCry »

Hello everybody;

I’m looking for some information about the Shred feature of 2xExplorer.
I can’t find it in the Help section.
Could someone please point me to it?

Thanks
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FarCry
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Post by FarCry »

I found this in Help > Features.
Shredding completely destroys files by deleting them after first overwriting their contents with 0s.

The Shredding feature is a nice addition to 2xExplorer.
Maybe you can enhance it so it can overwrite more than once.

Thanks
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nikos
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Post by nikos »

why though?
it doesn't really affect anything
once you set something to 0 the old content is lost forever
or am i missing something here?
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FarCry
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Post by FarCry »

It's not important.

I was just playing with the feature and wanted it to be a wiping program that wipes to DOD specifications and also wipes free space.

Thanks for the reply nikos, I was just thinking out loud.
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nikos
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Post by nikos »

as i see it, wiping contents is like getting pregnant;
there's no case of being "a little" wiped/pregnant;
it's all or nothing in both cases
:)
curedum
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Post by curedum »

As I understand it, a file can in fact be only partly shredded - see "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory" by Peter Gutmann and the US DoD 5220.22-M National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual (NISPOM)

Whilst overwriting a file with binary "0"s will indeed prevent a simple undelete utility from restoring it, there are apparently sophisticated techniques for recovering data from a disk even after it's been overwritten several times. Hence the US DoD specification which requires writing zeros, ones, and a pseudo-random bit stream and its binary complement three times. Also ideally the length of the file should be truncated to zero and the filename overwritten before final deletion.

Yes, we're deep into paranoid territory, folks!
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nikos
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Post by nikos »

can US agents also "undo" pregnancy then? :)

if anything is to go by, 2x does set the file size to 0 after shredding, this is to fool any possible hard links on the same file

BTW the first of your 2 links is defekter
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