Shred changes default number of passes to 3

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I thought it would be nice to share with you that I received a comment from Pádraig Brady, member of the GNU Core Utilities (coreutils) maintainers team, on yesterday’s post about effective data wiping saying that he has decreased shred‘s default number of passes from 25 to 3, as shown in this git commit. The commit’s comment reveals that there has been a discussion on this matter:

shred: change default number of overwrites from 25 to 3

* src/shred.c: The concensus is that a default of 3
passes is appropriate for current drive technologies.
* src/TODO: Reference Paul Eggert's suggestion
of enhancing shred to conform to DoD 5220 rules.

I would like to publicly thank Pádraig for the feedback. There are times that the open source development model takes me by surprise.

Shred changes default number of passes to 3 by George Notaras is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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About George Notaras

George Notaras is the editor of the G-Loaded Journal, a technical blog about Free and Open-Source Software. George, among other things, is an enthusiast self-taught GNU/Linux system administrator. He has created this web site to share the IT knowledge and experience he has gained over the years with other people. George primarily uses CentOS and Fedora. He has also developed some open-source software projects in his spare time.

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