How To Securely Delete & Wipe Data [Linux]

Making sure you have adequate security measures in place while working on your computer is beyond important, especially when you’re working with sensitive files in personal or workplace environments. There are numerous tasks you are advised to do, such as install an anti-virus program for Windows or correctly set up a firewall. However, those only protect you from remote threats.In case your system is stolen, doing things such as encrypting your hard drive and securely deleting your files can prevent the thief from reaching the data they may be looking for. Today we’ll be focusing on how to delete your files securely to prevent their recovery, and how you can accomplish that on a Linux system.ShredThere are a number of different options available for you when it comes to secure deletion and wiping. The first one is a utility called shred. With it, you can delete files as well as hard drives securely. It should already be installed on your Linux system by default, so no installation of the utility is necessary.To “shred” a file, you simply need to run the command shred /path/to/file. This will overwrite the data that the file in question takes up, but the file itself will still appear as it hasn’t been deleted. To run the utility and have it delete the file, you can run shred â€"-remove /path/to/file. Finally, shred only overwrites the data a few times by default. To change this setting, you can run shred -â€"iterations=50 /path/to/file to have shred ov