shredding files on a flash drive

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sat, Jan 19, 2008 at 06:57:28PM -0500, Anthony de Boer wrote:
> If there's even the slightest chance you'll eventually run up against a
> filesystem that does compression and can store a lot of /dev/zero in a
> very small space, you could eventually get burned.  Giving it /dev/urandom
> gives it something it can't effectively compress and has to write out in
> detail.

If you use compression, then all bets or off since the compression will
certainly not generate a pattern on disk (or flash) matching the intent
which in this case would be to fill the device causing as much as
possible to get overwritten without causing excess erase/write cycles to
the flash chip.

Besides does anyone actually bother wasting time on compressed
filesystems anymore?

--
Len Sorensen
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