Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Secure delete 'shred' equivalent for OS X

OS X ships with srm instead of shred. Functionality is fairly similar, the default operation is a 35-pass Gutmann algorithm, which can be rather slow. Here are the timing results using the defaults and then the fast option (single random pass, then zeros) on 50M files:
$ time srm random_test

real 0m22.623s
user 0m2.847s
sys 0m0.417s

$ time srm -sz random_test2

real 0m1.527s
user 0m0.349s
sys 0m0.046s
Unless you are feeling super paranoid this is the best option:
srm -sz file_to_delete 

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