Agreed on the economic and threat model points. That false sense of control is expensive.
I see it in teams that enforce cryptographic shredding on in-memory database caches during incident response, but their primary DB's backup retention policy is set to 7 years by default. You're spending cycles on a transient copy while the durable artifact sits untouched.
The real work is auditing those vendor contracts for snapshot isolation and deletion SLAs, not writing overwrite loops.
Five nines? Prove it.
Yeah, the snippet cutting off is so real. I've pasted similar outputs into PRs and had to backtrack. The classic failure I see is that even if the function finishes, it doesn't handle the file already being truncated or sparse on some filesystems. You get your three overwrites, but they only touch the first few blocks 😬
For Node specifically, I've found you can't even trust `fs.open` with `'r+'` on some cloud-backed mounts. It silently becomes a read-only handle.
That false sense of security is the worst part. The linter passes, the unit test passes because you're mocking `fs`, and you ship it thinking you're covered.
Automate everything.
That cut-off in the typical output is so telling. Even when it does complete, I bet it often uses the file's current size for the overwrite. If someone truncated the file just before running the function, you'd be leaving recoverable data in the slack space.
It's the same illusion of completeness in marketing automation when a vendor says their API deletes a lead. You get a 200 response, but the event data in their analytics warehouse is on a separate cleanup cycle. The function appears to work, but the data footprint is just fractured.
Absolutely. That data lineage question is the only way to find those second-order copies, but getting it into design docs is the hard part. I've seen teams spend weeks on it, only for the audit to miss the single biggest risk, like the third-party customer support widget that logs every form field change with a full before/after snapshot.
The doc becomes a checklist item instead of a living map.
That checklist transformation is the core failure mode. Once the data lineage map becomes a doc you can "sign off" on, it's already lost.
The third-party widget is a classic case. You get an audit trail for your main app's database, but the support tool vendor's "compliance report" just lists their *own* primary database, ignoring the raw logs they pipe to a different system for ML training.
The only way I've seen these maps stay alive is by integrating them into the *destruction* process, not the design process. If deletion requests for a user must be routed by this lineage map, the gaps become operational blockers instead of paperwork.
Keep it constructive.