this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
270 points (99.6% liked)
Self Hosted - Self-hosting your services.
11503 readers
2 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules
- No harassment
- crossposts from c/Open Source & c/docker & related may be allowed, depending on context
- Video Promoting is allowed if is within the topic.
- No spamming.
- Stay friendly.
- Follow the lemmy.ml instance rules.
- Tag your post. (Read under)
Important
Beginning of January 1st 2024 this rule WILL be enforced. Posts that are not tagged will be warned and if not fixed within 24h then removed!
- Lemmy doesn't have tags yet, so mark it with [Question], [Help], [Project], [Other], [Promoting] or other you may think is appropriate.
Cross-posting
- [email protected] is allowed!
- [email protected] is allowed!
- [email protected] is allowed!
- [email protected] is allowed if topic has to do with selfhosting.
- [email protected] is allowed!
If you see a rule-breaker please DM the mods!
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If you aren't going to fully wipe your drive in horrible events like this, at the very least use
shredinstead ofrm.rmsimply removes references to the file in the filesystem, leaving the data behind on the disk until other data happens to be written there.Do not ever allow data like that to exist on your machines. The law doesn't care how it got there.
Was going to say the same. Windows and Linux both use “lazy” ways of deleting things, because there’s not usually a need to actually wipe the data. Overwriting the data takes a lot more time, and on an SSD it costs valuable write cycles. Instead, it simply marks the space as usable again, and removes any associations to the file that the OS had. But the data still exists on the drive, because it’s simply been marked as writeable again.
There are plenty of programs that will be able to read that “deleted” content, because (again) it still exists on the drive. If you just deleted it and haven’t used the drive a lot since then, it’s entirely possible that the data hasn’t been overwritten yet.
You need a form of secure delete, which doesn’t just mark the space is usable. A secure delete will overwrite the data with junk data. Essentially white noise 1’s and 0’s, so the data is completely gone instead of simply being marked as writeable.
Would rm be okay if you regularly fstrim?
No, fstrim just tells your drive it doesn't need to care about existing data when writing over it. Depending on your drive, direct access to the flash chips might still reveal the original data.
If you want ensure data deletion, as OP said, you'll need to zero out the whole drive and then fstrim to regain performance. Also see ATA Secure Erase. Some drives encrypt by default and have Secure Erase generate a new key. That will disable access to the old data without having to touch every bit.