Permanently Deleting files with File Shredder

In our previous post on recovering deleted files, we discussed how it is possible to recover a delete files rather easily. Today, I will show you how to protect your sensitive information and keep such data away from prying eyes and curious busybodies.

If the data is preserved on disk when we delete a file, it can be recovered. However, if even a part of this data is destroyed, the file becomes extremely hard to recover. How can we get the computer to write over the data sectors? One way is to defragment the drive, which rearranges the data in the drive, effectively overwriting many sectors that are marked as empty but still contain residual data.

This is not foolproof, though, as you cannot control which sectors are overwritten and which are preserved. A safer way would be to use file shredder, which like a paper shredder, will chop your file up and write over the sectors with random bits of data, effectively destroying the file permanently.



A simple shred of the file and it would be nearly impossible to recover anything useful from it. This is a free program and I strongly recommend you use it to destroy all sensitive data that you do not need anymore.