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
you can fill up the disk a few times after deleting files, so the system has to use up all free space and no matter where your data was it gets overwritten.
Not necessarily true. SSDs can mark sectors that have been written too much as bad, so the data still there to be read forensically, but you can’t write to it anymore.
If you’re that worried about privacy, then your only option is hammer+fire+spread the remains in multiple places. For the average paranoid I think it’s enough to make generic file recovery tools ineffective.
It’s much easier to use full disc encryption, and just change the keys
But every company I’ve ever worked for, when they retire machines they keep the drives no exceptions.
If it’s good enough for corporate security, we know works at least.
For context, a cheap internal SSD is about $20. Not some crazy impossible expense. When we talk about taking the storage device out of the computer, we’re talking about investing $20 to not have to worry about data leaking into the future. And at that cost it’s basically a no-brainer. It would be crazy not to do it