Paragraph Number

243

An empty-block directive may be added to the block storage APIs and/or protocols. File systems and other clients of the API and/or protocol may be enhanced to issue these directives. For example, when a file is deleted, the file-system can issue an “empty-block” directive for the blocks that contained the data for that file, indicating that the contents of the blocks do not need to be retained (e.g., the blocks can be considered free space). This directive may serve a secondary security purpose by incorporating a flag to indicate that the existing data should be destroyed.

Added by DJM 3 2021