Less aggressive overwrite about caja-wipe HOT 2 OPEN

Hi ,

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. Currently there isn't a way to pass an argument to the script. This means that, as you noted, you'll have to modify the script manually. I presume you have it installed to ~/.local/share/caja-python/extensions/caja-wipe.py ?

You'll need to open the script in a text editor and go to line 105 : 'cmd = [ "srm", "-rv", path ]'. There are three options you can take to speed it up, in order of slowest to fastest:

1. Change line 105 to read 'cmd = [ "srm", "-frv", path ]'. This is the "fast (and insecure) mode: no /dev/urandom, no synchronize mode."

2. Change line 105 to read 'cmd = ["srm", "-lrv", path]'. This will greatly lessen the security of the overwrite, but speed it up quite a good deal. "Only two passes are written: one mode with 0xff and a final mode random values."

3. Change line 105 to read 'cmd = ["srm", "-llrv", path]' (same as option 2 but with a second -l). "-l for a second time lessens the security even more: only one random pass is written."

Even though these are all less secure than using the default, they are most likely more than enough for what you need. Unless you are going against a talented/well-funded actor (or someone with a lot of time on their hands), a single overwrite will probably be enough to keep someone from recovering your file(s). For normal deletion, the file isn't actually overwritten immediately, which makes it relatively trivial to recover.

Could you let me know what Linux distro you are running? While researching this I've realised that srm in Debian (which is what I've used for the majority of my time with Linux, and when I wrote caja-wipe) may be more powerful than srm in, say, Arch. The modifications I listed above may not work if you are not using a Debian or Ubuntu-based distro.

May I copy your email (including all replies) to my bug tracker on GitHub? That way I can have a publicly-viewable explanation of why I've made certain changes. No worries if you'd rather me not.

One more thought. I may try to add the functionality into Caja-wipe where the user can modify a config file (probably stored in .config/caja-wipe.conf or somewhere similar), so that the erase/overwrite procedure will be less agressive.

Cheers!

Fred

from caja-wipe.

reply from OP
Awesome, thank you so much, the last 60gb file to erase was a torture ... Im on it now I will give you the results soon.

i run an ubuntu-mate on a amd64 , yes you can move it to github

Awesome again

from caja-wipe.