If you have a disk drive, SSD or NVME storage device that need to be wiped clean, I recommend that you use the shred command.

In this example, I’m cleaning up the contents of my NVME device at /dev/nvme0n1.

sudo shred -v -n 1 --random-source=/dev/urandom -z /dev/nvme0n1

I’m using these options and their explanation.

  • -v is verbose
  • -n is the number of iterations. Mine is set to 1. You can increase it, but it can take hours.
  • –random-source is set to /dev/urandom which is the kernel’s random number generator.
  • -z means everything gets overwritten by zeros.

Shred will make it nearly impossible to steal your data.