Missing Link

What do you do when you’re finished with a document on your computer and need or want to get rid of it?   For most people the answer is to delete the file.  That is, after all, the most logical thing to do, right?   What a lot of people fail to realize is that simply deleting a file does NOT remove it from your hard drive.  A person skilled in data recovery can easily recover that data unless it has been overwritten several times.  Deleting the file only removes references to the file from the filesystem.  It does not physically remove the data from the drive, however, instead it just allows the computer to overwrite the space where it had been stored.

There are, however, ways you can securely delete files from your computer.  These tools will overwrite the space on the hard drive where the file resided,  usually 7 or more times (and often the number of passes is configurable).  This morning my boss brought to my attention the fact that one such utility is available by default on Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).   The command, srm, is used via the command line and will securely remove your files.

(continue reading…)