Warning: Modern disk/SSD hardware and modern filesystems may squirrel away data in places where you cannot delete them, so this process may still leave data on the disk.
The only safe ways of wiping data are the ATA Secure Erase command (if implemented correctly), or physical destruction.
You can use a suite of tools called secure-delete on Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install secure-delete
This has four tools:
srm - securely delete an existing file
smem - securely delete traces of a file from ram
sfill - wipe all the space marked as empty on your hard drive
sswap - wipe all the data from you swap space.
Date OG: April 28th, 2018 @ 20:36
Date (Update 1): September 3rd 2024
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