shred files

Submitted by vanrug on Wed, 01/14/2026 - 02:49
Forums: 
Support
Forum tags: 
shred with bleachbit

Hello, could someone explain how the "destroy files/folders" function works? Does it overwrite the data or simply delete it without going through the Recycle Bin?
English isn't really my first language, and I'm not sure I fully understand the information in the documentation.

Thanks

BleachBit version: 
4.6.0
Your operating system: 
ubuntu 24.04 cinnamon

andrew

Wed, 01/14/2026 - 08:10

BleachBit has a feature to overwrite files to prevent recovery of the content and the file name. Deletion will bypass the recycle bin. Overwriting is much slower than normal deletion. Overwriting may not be fully effective on all file systems, and overwriting is not needed on encrypted file systems.

By the way, your BleachBit 4.6.0 is very old, and you may want to update to Bleachbit 5.0.2. The Ubuntu 24.04 repository will never have a newer version of BleachBit: they update it only with Ubuntu upgrades, like Ubuntu 24.10 or Ubuntu 25.04. You can download BleachBit 5.0.2 from this website.

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Andrew, lead developer

vanrug

Thu, 01/15/2026 - 03:09

Hi,
thanks for the clarification.