hi,
My company gave me a laptop for work and after some time they will give it to another person when I quit the company so I want to make sure I don’t leave any of my data behind so which command should I run to delete my home directory to delete all the data?
is it just
rm -rf /home/myname
after rm fill up the file system with random data a few times, then copy /etc/skel/ over to get the default configs back. maybe, if you’re paranoid, use a few apps like browsers, so if they actually look, there will be misleading results.
Depending on your threat model this will be very insufficient.
Discs have provisions for bad sectors, they have backup sectors, so if a sector gets too many errors, or has been written to too many times, disks can set aside that sector never to be written to again. So you can have unencrypted data just sitting there ready for somebody to read it
All of the operations indicated in the above post, rely on the file system behaving, and not at the disc level. So superblocks inodes journals and other file system specific data structures could be completely missed. Some file systems store user data inside of these special structures for efficiency purposes such as locality of reference, and time locality.