If you are like us you have a healthy dose of paranoia in your blood and if that means going the extra mile we know that you will walk by our sides to get there. Deleting files in Windows does not remove the file from the hard drive, it simply removes the pointer to the file but keeps the data on it.
That’s how file recovery programs like Recuva operate. They scan the hard drive for those deleted files and have a good chance of recovering them. The chance is better for newly deleted files because the chance is lower that their sectors on the hard drive have been overwritten by other files.
You will hopefully agree with us that it is highly impracticable to wait until the file has been overwritten by other files to make sure that it cannot be recovered by normal means.
One solution is to use so called File Wipers and DP Secure Wiper by Dirk Paehl is one of them. It provides three different methods of deleting a file permanently so that it cannot be recovered anymore.
Single Overwrite: This is the fastest way of deleting a file. File Recovery Programs that are freely available on the Internet will not be able to recover the file anymore.
lDoD Wipe: Department of Defense compliant wiping. The file will be overwritten seven times.
Gutmann’s Method: It will overwrite the file with 35 different patterns.
DP Secure Wiper works by dragging and dropping files or folders into the program window. The one thing that is missing in our opinion is a context menu entry that sends files directly to the application.
Related posts:
Wipe Disk and Wipe FilesRecover Deleted Files
Recover Files with Handy Recovery
File Recovery with Undelete My Files
Recover Deleted Files
Martin, “If you are like us you have a healthy dose of paranoia in your blood and if that means going the extra mile we know that you will walk by our sides to get there.” – An unhealthy dose indeed would mean going the extra mile alone!
I like to try to figure out what a community of paranoids could lead to. Perhaps to an anti-paranoia reaction, daddy cool sort of, no locks, no security, no harm, no borders, no propriety … does that sound nice, and so unfortunately inappropriate.
So it appears we agree!
Doesn’t Windows come with something like the Linux command “shred” built in? I would imagine that any OS would have such a utility. “Shred” overwrites files with random junk, and can optionally delete the file afterwards. Actually, I always use it with the delete option.
Thanks for the tip, Martin. I always appreciate hearing about programs I’ve never heard of before. However, I’ll stick with the one I’ve been using for many years: Eraser. It has everything DP has, and much more (including customizable context menu options, wipe free space, erase recycle bin contents, scheduling tasks, etc.).
http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/download.php