How to electronically eradicate, expunge, extirpate, obliterate digital data
- Mental Outlaw, 2025-05-28
Partitions
All data on device sdX may be permanently destroyed by using the command-line interface (warning - this may take a very long time):dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX
- Confirmation of whether or not any non-zero bytes exist:
dd if=/dev/sdX | hexdump -C | grep [^00]
TIP: An easier method, of making data permanently inaccessible, is to perform encryption of the entire disk/partition and then disposing of the encryption keys.
Individual files
Individual files may be made permanently inaccessible by:- First, encrypting them
- then, deleting them in the usual way, e.g.:
shred -uvz <file>
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