On 2021-03-05 09:41, John Foust via cctalk wrote: > > This situation makes me hesitant to release disk images from the past. > It's one thing to do it with disks that were mine and to take responsibility > for my risk; it's another to release disks once owned and used by others. > Do the unused sectors contain their love letters from 1983? > > Or if I want to release disk images that contain known personal files, > how will I image, then remove specific files, then zero unused blocks > if I don't want to alter the original media?
I started to do something in this direction, using a lot of virtual machines ... Before I make backups, I write a file with zero content, until it fills up the filesystems (something like dd if=/dev/zero of=/ttt.tmp ; rm ttt.tmp) Two benefits: a.) there shouldn't be any hidden stuff anymore b.) the file containers can be zipped nicely, as all unused stuff is zero Hope it helps ...
