Secure delete has become quite difficult to achieve, if it is on a SSD then you may only be safe with an ATA command, but not all drives will even do that right

Secure delete has become quite difficult to achieve, if it is on a SSD then you may only be safe with an ATA command, but not all drives will even do that right[1]. It is even hard to be sure that you have over-written every block anyway, due to over-provisioning. Filesystems can also make this quite difficult (and that is without considering snaphots), most journalling and log-structured filesystems break the old shred [2] program for instance. [1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/fast11/tech/full_papers/Wei.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/fast11/tech/full_papers/... [2] man shred