vmss) that's another pot of worms I haven't considered One can assume the OS may/may not place my secure file within this area and of course no matter how many overwrites we make of the file to be deleted it's irrelevant as it was once within some type of cache located in a file elsewhere! In terms of these memory based files (.vswp. if a snapshot was taken on day 1 and on day 2 a file was securely deleted, it wouldn't be possible to reclaim the securely deleted file from the snapshot itself - would it? Therefore am I correct in assuming that the snapshot itself would not contain the securly deleted data? i.e. But out of curiosity, my understanding is that a snapshot isn't a replica of data, just a type of pointer or record of changes made after a specific point in time. We're not using linked clones either - so that's another weight of my mind but many thanks for the pointer and of course our process of snapshoting drives will also need review. So we're not looking at securely deleting the complete vmdk. Our requirements are actually simpler than discussed (I think), for example we only need to securely erase a selection of folders amongst others that do not require this level of delete. We don't use the MSA Snapshot software so suspect we're not at the mercy of COW - but I suspect pudent to discuss with HP? Resources being used, and produce space-efficient,

Modular Smart Array Snapshot Software that it Offered by the optional HP StorageWorks 2000 Sorry for the incorrect forum! Thanks for moving it on my behalf and thanks to all those who have replied too.Īn interesting educational point is 'copy-on-write' as I wasn't aware of this technology or at least it's technical name - its I guess what VSS and similar snapshot tools are built upon? However we're using an MSA2000 SAN which indeed does support COW but only when additional software is purchased - from the sales blurb:Īll the MSA2000 models offer increased data protection with theĬontroller-based snapshot and cloning functionality

Dod disk wipe