On 2025-07-27 18:10, Stan Marsh wrote:
Just out of curiosity, why is shred obsolete?
Oh, that's a long story. Some of it is covered in the manual here:
https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/shred-invocation.html
but that's a bit out of date. Here's something that's more up-to-date
(though admittedly I haven't read it in detail):
Aronsson F, Lund O. Secure Data Deletion: Ensuring Confidentiality in
Digital Systems – a survey of methods for data erasure. Master's thesis,
Linköping U. 2025.
https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1975833/FULLTEXT01.pdf
The bottom line is that you should not trust 'shred' to delete your data
unless you know what you're doing (which most people don't). Or more
concisely: although 'shred' was useful by default, now it isn't.
