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
Shred feature - Shred feature information
Moderators: fgagnon, nikos, Site Mods
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!
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!