[arch-general] 2 recommendations needed for installing ArchLinux

Thomas Bächler thomas at archlinux.org
Tue Dec 6 11:28:06 EST 2011


Am 06.12.2011 17:22, schrieb Kevin Chadwick:
> On Tue, 06 Dec 2011 17:08:46 +0100
> Thomas Bächler wrote:
> 
>> Generally, running 'rm' on a file means it's gone. It's the
>> specification of 'rm'.
> 
> Sort of, more so on SSDs but it's just harder to reconstruct because
> SSDs writes are spread out as sectors get worn out much quicker. For
> speed, /bin/rm just removes the reference

I'm not talking about implementation, but about specification. There is
no guarantee that the file is gone, and there is also no guarantee that
it can be recovered. If you run 'rm', you should expect the file to be
gone for good - because that is what can happen according to the
specification.

Re: SSDs: File systems like ext4 can run discard commands that will tell
the SSD firmware that the data is no longer needed - so even though the
data is still there, the place on the SSD where the data resides is no
longer associated with the logical "block" where they were. If you read
that block, the SSD firmware may simply return a bunch of zeroes.
Recovering data in this case requires raw access to the flash memory
itself (which modern SSDs won't grant you).

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