Re: Wipe available diskspace

[Colomban Wendling <lists ban herbesfolles org>]

Hi,

Note: Nautilus Wipe has no direct relation with Nautilus, beside it
being an extension for Nautilus.

On 13/11/2015 21:31, Narcis Garcia wrote:
> I'm using nautilus-wipe extension, and today I wanted to look the "Wipe
> available diskspace" function.
> In all phrases and in the manual only use the term "available" about
> space, and I need to be very sure this is referring exclusively to
> unallocated blocks, it is, space not assigned to any inode nor
> filesystem working structure.
>
> Help should tell more about what means wiping available diskspace.

I'm about to add this to the help, under *Wiping available disk space on
storage media*:

> Only the actually available and unused disk space will be wiped by
> this operation, and no existing files will be affected. New files
> created while the operation is running will not be affected either,
> but files deleted in an insecure manner from the same storage medium
> during the operation might be wiped.

Does this look good to you, and does it answer your questions?

Technically, it will also wipe free (unused/unallocated) INode space,
but I can't find a not-too-technical way to say this (e.g. without using
the word "inode"), and I guess for most people it isn't a useful
information.  Yet, I'm open to a good suggestion.


BTW, if you're interested to know exactly how everything is done and all
technically, I suggest you to also give a look at the tool Nautilus Wipe
uses to actually do its job, secure-delete.


Regards,
Colomban