this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2024
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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

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

If the drive is dead, as in, it has a hardware defect that keeps the computer from reading the data, you're out of luck. For a lot of money, someone can take out the disk platter in a clean room, and read it with another read head.
If only the partitions, partition table or file system are corrupt, you can dd it to a different drive and either re-write the metadata if you know what it was or use software to recognize the start- and endpoints of the file types that are stored on it and recreate them with free tools. But you'll lose all file names and the folder structure.