Some might now bring forth the old argument of having nothing to fear if you have got nothing to hide, which has been refuted over and over again. One argument against is that you may value your privacy. There is really no need for someone else to see family photos, financial documents or private email messages when you are crossing the border.

Zer0 is a basic program for Windows that deletes files so that they become unrecoverable on the system. The developers state that it is using a “high security file deletion” algorithm, but fail to elaborate on that. Tests confirmed that files can’t be recovered with software like Recuva or Undelete My Files.

While that may do for private use, it is not recommended for corporate environments because of the lack of information.

Files can only be added via drag and drop to the program interface. Each file is listed with its full file path, size and a status code.

A click on delete removes the selected files from the system and overwrites the occupied space on the hard drive so that it cannot be recovered afterwards. Successful deletions are indicated in the status column in the interface.

Zer0 is nowhere near as sophisticated as Eraser for instance. The program still gets the job done even though you’d probably would want to skip it if you are deleting a lot of files regularly on the system.

You can download the program from the developer website. Please note that a “free of all sponsored” offers version is provided on the download page next to the regular program versions. If you download the regular version, you will notice that it is filled to the brim with those offers that install toolbars and other gimmicks that you may not need on your system.

Free File Wiper is an alternative that provides more information about the file deletion process.

Download Freeraser from this link: http://www.codyssey.com/products/freeraser.html

Freeraser is a complete portable data shredder. It features three mechanisms with multiple rounds-filling to ensure that data is completely eradicated. This application is easy to use and install and can be launched from the system tray or by utilizing the featured Recycle Bin image icon. You can drag and drop files for complete deletion into this Recycle Bin, not to be confused with the Windows Recycle Bin, which still leaves shadow copies. For deletion of files, Freeraser offers three Destruction Modes: Fast, Forced and Ultimate.

The Fast mode is a standard 1-round filling of data. Forced allows 3 rounds and Ultimate forces 35 rounds of data filling. Specify the erasing mechanism and then drag and drop file or folder into the Freeraser Recycle Bin. This will permanently eradicate the data and not even System Restore will be able to recover it. Be certain that you want this data eliminated. Since this is a portable program, you can use it on multiple computers in a network to clear sensitive data specific to each PC.

You will see a message box requesting confirmation. Click Continue to proceed with complete erasure. Remember that the file will not be recoverable once it is deleted in this manner using this software. If it is an important file or document, back it up on a removable device such as an external hard drive or USB flash drive first. This way, you will still have the data but the computer will not. Always backup important data to external memory devices and keep these devices disconnected when not in use. This will ensure security of the sensitive information. Don’t keep it on the computer, make sure that you can remove it from the computer and use it later. That is simple enough.

From the system tray icon, you can also configure appearance and system alerts. The recycle bin shows up as a large icon on the desktop. You can configure its size and transparency or simply remove it by exiting from the tray icon when you are finished deleting files.

If you have recently completed a large project on your computer and you want all traces of it to be gone once you transfer to external media, this is a great portable approach. No matter where you work from, you can leave no trace of data. This works on all Windows operating systems, so you do not need different versions of this portable software.

Delete On Click is a very straightforward security software program for the Windows operating system. It adds a Delete On Click entry to the Windows Explorer context menu that can be used to delete files securely on the operating system.

The security software will delete the file completely so that no traces of it are found on the hard drive where it was stored. The method that is used to delete the files securely is unfortunately not revealed by the developers of the security software. Tests with file recovery tools did not display the deleted tests files when deleted with the Delete On click program.

Delete On Click is a free download that is available on the developer’s website.

Such is the case with removing files. There are two fundamental ways to remove a file:

With the help of a GUI such as Thunar, Dolphin, or Nautilus

With the help of a command such as rm or shred.

In this article we will primarily examine the latter and touch on the former.

The former – GUI

As you would expect, in all three of the graphical file managers you can easily remove a file simply by right clicking the file and selecting Delete. There are, however, some subtle differences. You will notice, in both Dolphin and Nautilus you can choose between Deleting a file and moving a file to the Trash. This behavior mimics that of Windows Explorer. Once you move a file to the Trash it will remain there until you empty your trash. Should you select to actually Delete the file, however, that file is deleted right away.

This behavior is not available in Thunar. With Thunar you can keep it or delete it.

rm that file

The basic remove command is rm. It is used like this:

rm OPTIONS

Believe it or not there are options to go along with the rm command. There are two options that are used most often:

f – This option will force the delete. In other words you will not have to answer “y” to every file you want to delete. This is very handy when you are deleted a directory.

r – This option will recursively delete all files within a directory as well as the directory itself.

As you can surmise, the r and f options are most often used together. So to delete the ~/TEST directory and all of its files you would issue the command:

rm -rf ~/TEST

If you only wanted to delete the file test.txt within the ~/TEST directory you would issue the command:

rm ~/TEST/test.txt

What if you wanted to delete all jpg files within the ~/TEST directory? Simple:

rm -f ~/TEST/*.jpg

The * character is a wild card which means, in this case, anything that ends with .jpg. Notice the “.”. If you leave that out you can delete any file ending in jpg – not just any file with the extension .jpg.

shredd’ing a file

The shred command is a whole different beast. Shred is for the paranoid. Shred completely obliviates a file by overwriting its contents. Instead of deleting a file shred will simply overwrite a file and the end results will be an unreadable binary file that can then be safely removed.

And no matter how paranoid you are, shred will help you out. You can declare how many overwrite iterations shred will perform. You can even add a final overwrite of nothing but zeros to hide the fact that you ever shredded a file. And finally, you can also add a switch to inform shred to automatically remove the file after the iterations.

Shred is used like so:

shred OPTIONS filename

The most popular options are:

v – Show progress.

z – Add final overwrite of zeros.

u – Remove file after iterations

n – Overwrites n times

So to shred a file by iterating 10 times, followed by a final iteration of zeros, and then deleting the file upon completion you would issue the command:

shred -v -n 10 -z  FILENAME -u

Where FILENAME is the actual file name.

After that command your removed file has vanished into thin air.

Final thoughts

Many different routes to the same destination. Of this, Linux is the master. In the case of removing files, you can send it to the trash for possible later easy retrieval, remove it with the possibility of a much more difficult retrieval, or shred it with no hopes of retrieval. Your call.

Auto Delete (via Shell City) by Dario Volaric is a similar tool for Windows. The main difference is that it will run at system startup or when the user executes it manually. Another difference is that it will only delete files in the directory if they are older than the age specified by the user. The time frame ranges from 1 day to 1 year.

The user can include subfolders automatically, select if the files should be moved into the recycle or if a status window should be shown during the deletion.

The software program will automatically close after the job has ended. The main limitation of it is that it can only process one target folder. It is also unlikely that the software developer will update the program anytime soon because the last update dates back to 2005.

Do you know of a similar application that can delete files if they are older than x? Let us know in the comments.