Question on shredding a terebyte drive

[Paul Johnson]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 3:32 PM, Dean S. Messing<deanm at sharplabs.com> wrote:
> I have a terebyte sata drive that I need to securely wipe clean.  It
> originally had 2 partitions.  I deleted them using `fdisk', rebooted,
> and then as root ran
>
>    shred -vz /dev/sdd
>
> The drive is capable of about 60MB/sec, but shred is only "shredding"
> about 25MB every 5 seconds according to its output.  Since the default
> number of passes is 25, this works out to about 5 days.
>

I have been reading this thread wondering this: why do we have to
shred the whole disk, why not just find the parts that are actually
used and write over them a few times.  I seriously doubt you have 1
terrabyte of precious data.

Another idea just hit me.  What if you encrypt the data on the disk.
Ubuntu has that thing now to create a Private encrypted partition.  Do
that, move your precious stuff in there.  then unmount.   That is
supposed to be just about impossible to recover, even for the NSA
kids.

Anybody know if it is easier to crack an ecrypted file system than
recover shredded data?

pj

-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas