I have managed to convine my company to allow me to use Linux (Ubuntu) as an operating system on my works laptop as I showed them Truecrypt working on XP and Ubuntu. They have now asked me what file shredding utility I’m using and I’m stumped. I have searched and can’t find one. It would really need to be a standalone program or (my preference ) a right click ‘Jobby’.
Any suggestions
My company are very strict on file security due to theft of information.
to a text file… call it Secure Delete (or whatever you want)… make it executable… and put it in your ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts directory.
(HINT - after installing nautilus-scripts-manager, you can easily get to the nautilus-scripts directory by right-clicking then selecting Scripts>Open Scripts Folder)
it will then be available as a right-click option… right-click on the file or directory you want to securely delete, and select Scripts>Secure Delete.
In particular see the Put Shred on Steroids section.
Effectively… shred = 25 passes, random data and zeros secure-delete (srm) = 38 passes, random data and zeros, and cryptographic techniques developed by Peter Gutmann (who describes himself as “a professional paranoid”). The Gutmann method is an algorithm for securely deleting files and hard drives
Or for truly stand alone “entire drive secure erase” options… there is always the DBAN (Darik’s Boot and Nuke) LiveCD/LiveUSB:
If you’ve already installed nautilus-scripts-manager and restarted nautilus (reboot), you can easily get to the ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts folder by right-clicking somewhere, then selecting Scripts>Open Scripts Folder
[EDIT]
Ignore the above, according to here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/NautilusScriptsHowto
the right-click>Scripts>Open Scripts Folder context menu item doesn’t appear UNTIL you have a script in the ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts folder.
[END EDIT]
Or go to your home folder, then hit Ctrl+H to view hidden files and folders.
Any file or folder that starts with a (.) is hidden, so you’ll have to either enable View>Show Hidden Files or hit Ctrl+H to see the .gnome2 folder.
You may need to restart nautilus after installing nautilus-scripts-manager, by either a reboot, or:
sudo killall nautilus
nautilus should restart itself… if not:
nautilus&
Or, if you’ve already created the Secure Delete text file and copied the script contents to it…
Place the Secure Delete file in your Home folder, then…
Make it executable with:
chmod +x ~/"Secure Delete"
and Move it to the ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts folder with:
Now check your Right-Click>Scripts context menu has an entry for Secure Delete.
Something to bear in mind… due to the limited write cycle capacity of USB memory sticks and SSD’s, the protracted use of “Secure Delete” (on them) may shorten the drives life… remember every time you “Secure Delete” something, that’s the equivalent of 38 write cycles (to one particular part of the drive)… though wear levelling may mitigate this to a certain extent.
