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Secure Delete/Erase


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Posted

This may seem like a few very basic questions, but I've just sat and gone through Unraid Docs, these forums and google but I can't see anyone asking them.

 

Background: my laptop is currently dying so I've backed stuff up to my tower, and was reading about how to dispose of a laptop where everyone is suggesting wiping then physically destroying hard drives, so while I'm in the process of that, I'm also thinking about the unraid tower:

 

I delete things from various places (krusader (docker), filezilla (windows app not docker), qbittorrent, and recently using a Dynamix (i think) plug in which allows deletion from the unraid GUI). Are these being deleted in the same way, though? Krusader has a trash and a delete, but everything else is just delete. How do I know if they're actually being wiped or just moved?

I recently deleted several TBs of data and I actually now want to ensure that it is securely erased. I have Eraser for my laptop which can do numerous passes to wipe in accordance with various protocols, but I can't see something similar for Unraid. I've seen mention of DBAN or scrub via CLI but i'd rather use an interface, too.

 

Is a better option to use unbalance to empty a drive, preclear it, then repeat for all disks? Or is there another way to securely erase empty space? I don't want to erase entire disks, just ensure that what has been deleted is definitively gone.

 

Thanks

Posted

Nothing is ever wiped when deleted, just marked as deleted as usual.

 

For SSDs a TRIM will erase any free space.

For HDDs you can just

dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/diskX/tmpfile bs=16M

It'll write a file until the drive is full, i.e. it'll have overwritten all the free space, then delete that tmpfile.

Posted
7 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Nothing is ever wiped when deleted, just marked as deleted as usual.

but it could be, right? with a program or plugin?

 

because like i said, i don't know what those commands mean, so CLI could be risky.

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