[sf-lug] Securely deleting+testing drives-take1

[aaronco36 at sdf.org]

Re: subject matter discussed at today's SF-LUG meeting

Here are some relevant(IMHO) links on securely deleting and adequately
surface-testing media such as USB flash drives that Bobbie might be using
for Ventoy....
+ Ventoy itself; https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html
+ the 'shred' manpage; https://linux.die.net/man/1/shred
+ the 'badblocks' manpage; https://linux.die.net/man/8/badblocks
+ a May 2020 article 'Hard drive shredding on Linux' (using both 'shred'
and badblocks'); https://linuxconfig.org/hard-drive-shredding-on-linux
+ Peter Gutmann's July 1996 article 'Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic
and Solid-State Memory';
https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html
+ Michael Wei et al's Febraury 2011 article 'Reliably Erasing Data From
Flash-Based Solid State Drives';
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/fast11/tech/full_papers/Wei.pdf
https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~swanson/papers/Fast2011SecErase.pdf

FWIW, running a 'shred -n25 -vz /dev/sdX' and 'badblocks -svvw /dev/sdX'
on that 128 GB non-SSD USB flash drive might take a VERRRRRY LONNNNNG
time!! Maybe finishing by U.S. Thanksgiving??

Might be acceptable timewise to rather run 'shred -vz /dev/sdX' followed
by a 'badblocks -svvn /dev/sdX' on that lower-capacity, non-SSD USB 2.x
drive (e.g., 8GB, 16GB, 32GB) before using that drive for Ventoy :-)

-A