Why When I Delete Am I Not Deleting?!

All the tools that are able to recover data from a hard disk are able do so because when you delete a file the sectors on the HDD that stored the data for that file aren't changed instead they are marked as available. This is done for performance reasons, it's alot faster to mark those sectors as available than change them.

This means that so long as those newly available sectors on the disk aren't written to the data will remain on the HDD.

To make the data permanently unrecoverable, or 'securely' delete it, we need to overwrite it. There are a number of command line tools we can use to do this for us, for no particular reason i'll be using shred.

Shred It!

The shred command isn't installed by default, at least not on Ubuntu 14.04, but is available from the default repos:

apt-get install shred

There are a few options we can pass to shred to tweak how hard it would be to recover the deleted data.

# A good set of defaults:
shred -f -u -v -z /some/sensitive/file

This will:

1. Set the file as read/writable if its not and we have permission to change it
2. Over write the file with random 3 times
3. Overwrite the file with zeros to hide that it's been shredded
4. Remove the file, aka mark the sectors it occupied as 'available'

And that's it, the file is gone, nobody is getting that back so be careful!

It's worth reading the caution at the bottom of shreds manpage especially if you are using and ext3 filesystem!

I'm Never Going To Remember That Command?

No need, I've written a caja-action that you can import and you will be able to securely delete files from the context menu! Aren't I nice? :)

Don't know what a caja-action is? Me neither until the other day! I should also note here that while i'm using Caja because im using MATE Linux this all applies to Nautilus to.

To import the caja action you will need to first install the caja-actions package:

apt-get install caja-actions

This will give us access to the caja-actions-config-tool command. On running this you will be presented with the GUI.

Next download the shred action and then run the Importer: Tools > Import assistant Once finished hit save and you're done!

That's it, you should see now see a shred action in the Caja context menu, although you may notice it's hidden in a Caja-Actions submenu, if like me you don't want this it can be disabled from the Edit > Preferences menu, just uncheck the Create a root 'Caja-Actions' menu option

Things Of Note

You will only be able to remove files, this will not work with directories as shred only affects files. This could be extended to recurse a directory structure however.