On Saturday 13 September 2003 01:05 am, Mathieu Frenette wrote: > > Thanks for all the replies everybody. I 'assume' then that > > when shredding file(s) that there is no fragmentation such > > as there is in the windows os and that the freed space > > can/is immediately available to be written to? > > As for fragmentation, it should not make a difference whether > you use "delete" or "shred", the same basic process happens, > as far as file allocation is concerned, and fragmentation will > still occur. > > M.
I have to disagree. Deleting a file removes it entry in the allocation table, so the system can't find it. But it is still there, right on your harddisk. Shredding a file overwrites all the inodes with random 0's and 1's . I suppose one can set the number of overwrites to anything to ones hearts content. I'm quite sure, that if I *shred* this text, say 10 times, it'll require some effort in a high-tech laboratory to recover it. In Linux - as in all Unixes - fragmentation is a *non-issue*. If one uses a genuine *nix filesystem ( like ext2, ext3, XFS, JFS or ReiserFS) there's no need whatsoever to do any defragmentation. A possible exception is - according to Civileme - JFS which is derived from OS/2 and hence inherited some compromises from way back when DOS/Windows was hot. Anyway - I recently had to buy a PC for my daughter. It came with something called WindowsXP preloaded. The filesystem was called NTFS, which - so I'm told - should combine some of the benefits of UNIX and OS/2. It was heavily defragged even on the first boot, and every attempt to defrag it was futile. At least, under OS/2 one could set up the config.sys to defrag the whole filesystem (HPFS) automatically on boot. Under this XP-thingy everything seems to be messed up permanently. Kaj Haulrich. -- Registered Linux user # 214073 at http://counter.li.org Powered by Linux - Mandrake 9.1 kernel 2.4.21-0.25mdk Sent to you from a 100 % MicroSCOft-free computer.
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