Does XFS filesystem support shredding?

Solution Verified - Updated -

Issue

  • shred may not work in XFS

  • shred may not work on xfs as its journald filesytem

    Snip from man page: man shred

    CAUTION:Note that shred relies on a very important assumption: that the file system
    overwrites data in place. This is the traditional way to do things, but many modern
    file system designs do not satisfy this assumption. The following are examples of file
    systems on which shred is not effective, or is not guaranteed to be effective in all
    file system modes:

       - log-structured or journaled file systems, such as those supplied with AIX and Solaris
       (and JFS, ReiserFS, XFS, Ext3, etc.)
    
       - file systems that write redundant data and carry on even if some writes fail, such as
       RAID-based file systems
    
       - file systems that make snapshots, such as Network Appliance's NFS server
    
       - file systems that cache in temporary locations, such as NFS version 3 clients
    
       - compressed file systems
    

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7

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